


The Trouble with Lesser Demons

by princessofmind



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 16:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 28,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessofmind/pseuds/princessofmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was a demon hunter.  He was a servant to one of the most deadly Lords of the Underworld on the run from his master.  Can I make it any more obvious?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> So, anyone who knows me also knows that I’m a huge theology nerd. This includes mythology and intrepretations of mythological creatures in major religions, especially Christianity. I was musing what I wanted to do for the writing challenge I decided to undertake, and I didn’t want to do anything with the existing universes I have, so I decided to go ahead and make a new one; why the hell not? This is not going to be overtly plot heavy; I just had to go ahead and set things up in this one, and with a prompt like beginnings, might as well get the plot over with. Look forward to the next installment over the course of the next 30 days!

In your numerous years of experience, you’ve learned to never expect what the arcane will do.

You’re older than you look, which is damn old enough in your opinion; your slick black hair peppered with silver but no less thick than it was in your youth. You have wrinkles forming on your forehead and not nearly enough laugh lines, permanent red marks on the side of your nose from your glasses an almost permanent snarl twisting your lips. You dress modestly for someone of your wealth and background, but the task has always been to blend in, and although your apartment looks meager enough, you have your luxuries where they count and no one else can see them.

People in your profession don’t usually live to your age, and if they do, they’re locked up in a pretty white room getting spoon fed apple sauce while they drool all over their scrubs. It’s not a pretty picture, and you like to think that your vanity has played a large part in your heightened self-preservation instincts, but the paranoia and complete lack of friends also makes you harder to target. You have no one to get to you through, no one to impersonate or posses, and you’re a good sight harder to get ahold of personally.

It’s as peaceful as it gets this close to the heart of the city, and with the blinds drawn and the wards firmly affixed to the rickety front door, you let yourself relax on the couch, dressed in a frumpy purple bathrobe and little else, a far cry from your usual intimidating form as you work your way through a pint of Ben & Jerry’s while the Colbert Report plays on the generously sized television before you.

There’s a sound, so faint if the television weren’t in the midst of switching to commercials you wouldn’t have heard it; it sounds like someone tried to knock on your door, only to pull their hand away with a hiss. That can really only mean one thing, and while usually the spirits or demons that track you to your home don’t bother with knocking, you’re no less put out about the situation.

The knife is a comfortable weight in your hands as you stride to the door, the wards unsealing as you peer outside, expecting many things, but not the slip of a man that practically bowls you over in an attempt to get inside the house. His skin is ashen (tip one) and his wide eyes are glowing in the most unnatural way (tip two) and it’s only his sheer panic that takes you aback and ends up with the two of you almost in the floor of the foyer.

“You’ve got to hide me,” the skinny thing almost climbing over your shoulder says, and you have to wonder if it’s possible for demons to become possessed themselves, because what the actual fuck?

“If you think I’ve got any little bit a’sympathy for your kind, you’re in the wrong place,” you reply, easily pulling him off you and dumping him rather unceremoniously on the concrete outside the door. “You’re lucky I don’t seen any kinna threat from you or I’d put a knife between your ribs.”

His glowing eyes narrow and he bares several rows of pointed teeth at you, and you roll your eyes. You’ve seen scarier monsters on daytime television. His head barely comes up to your chin when he stands, and although his fingernails are pointed some of them are torn off and his whip-like tail is standing straight up and if it had fur, you bet it’d be puffed up like a scared cat. Whatever he’s running from scares him more than you, and considering you could squish him like a bug, that’s quite the feat.

“You can try and kill me later.” His voice is raspy and hoarse, either from disuse or overuse, you can’t tell, and through the strange glowing you can see his pupils blown wide, as if he’s simultaneously trying to threaten you and at the same time show he desperately needs to crawl in to your pantry and find a hiding place behind the Captain Crunch.

You’re about to argue, slam the door in his face: you make your living disposing of nuisances like him, and he’s barely even a nuisance they way he is, but a sudden sensation makes the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up and a violent shudder wracks the demon in front of you from the tip of his tail to his toes. You grab him with the hand not holding the knife, pulling him inside and closing the door behind you with your hip.

“Just get out of sight and for the love ‘a God don’t touch anything.”

You don’t bother to check if he followed your instructions, instead turning to the door and pressing on the wards almost absentmindedly, knowing they’re secure again now that the door is closed, but you can feel that spine-tingling presence approaching, and you sincerely hope these are enough, because you can practically feel the pitch black coming towards the apartment, seeping under the crack of the door and threading through your very bones. The sensation makes your stomach churn, and for a sickening moment you think the damn thing can actually squeeze under the door, but the space is just a hair’s breadth too small, and the presence hisses something in a language you don’t understand before continuing, taking the chill with it.

You don’t know how long you stand there trying to shake the numbness from your limbs and stuff down the urge to be violently ill (you’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, things don’t still affect you like this) before you trudge back to your bedroom to dress and deal with your rather unexpected (and unwelcome) guest.

Turns out his idea of hiding was collapsing on the bed, the glow no longer visible with his eyes closed, knees drawn up to his chest while his tail rests over his neck and the tip on his nose. You don’t see any visible scales or other animal markings aside from the ram horns curling about the sides of his head (showing of his class indeed), but you can see blood sticking his t-shirt to his back and dried rivulets of the stuff on his arms. He’s going to stain your damn comforter. You push your glasses up to your forehead as you pinch the bridge of your nose, exhaling loudly.

Now what?


	2. Accusation

It's been about a week since Sollux Captor rather unceremoniously bolted head-first in to your life. There's not really been a conversation, although you suppose there really ought to be, just a lot of unspoken rules (on your part) and skirting just barely around said rules (on his part). Despite how comically at ease he seems to be in an apartment full of weapons and wards and spells that could kill him fifty ways to Sunday, you know he still floats by the door with a weariness you can barely make out in his absurdly bright eyes, and you think the threat of the much more certain demise outside your door keeps him in check.

Most of the time.

The elegant brown box with curled gold writing sitting temptingly in your freezer is empty. Food is one of your pleasures, and there had been exactly three ice cream bars in the package before you and the demon had one apiece. You've been holed up in the closet-sized space that is your work room, and your new demon housemate had been especially docile. That should have tipped you off.

"You ate the last ice cream bar."

He's laying on his stomach flipping through an old manuscript you left laying on the table (does he even read Greek?) and it's with barely hidden disdain that his eyes leave the page and focus on you. With chalk all over your clothes and streaking your hair and smudging your face, brandishing an empty cardboard box, you don't paint a very intimidating picture. He smirks, fangs poking out in a way that's far cuter than intimidating (damned if you'll tell him that).

"Yeah, I was never told I couldn't," he said, setting the manuscript aside and hovering over the back of the couch and up until he's eye-level with you. (The morning after you first met him, you entertained the thought that you had been mistaken about his height, but he barely hits your chin, and more often than not he levitates himself to gain that extra handful of inches between the two of you.)

You look over the rims of your glasses at him, unable to make out the pupils of his eyes when he levitates himself, but you can feel that he's looking at you, especially with the way his eyebrow is cocked in amusement. "You're a guest in my fuckin' house. I didn't think it needed instruction."

He guffaws, and you shove him over the back of the couch, which hardly phases someone who can fly, but it goes a long way to make you feel better. "You're expecting manners out of me? _How_ long have you been doing this?"

You scrutinize his ashen skin and ram's horns and glowing eyes and let out a long sigh. "Longer an' you've been alive, and although your kind ain't exactly known for respectin' the property of others, you should at least have the common fuckin' decency to respect your host."

"But it was _good_."

The box crunches beneath your fingers. "Of course it was _good_. That's why I bought them. Me. With my money. If you're gonna be takin' such egregious liberties with my possessions, I'm afraid this arrangement just isn't going to work."

"Who even talks like that anymore?" he asks, but you can see his gaze flit to the sealed door across the room. "You'd really kick me out. Over an ice cream bar."

No, you really wouldn't. But if you give an inch, you give a mile, and as unprecedented as it is to have him floating around behind you while you cook, it's the first company you've had since your partner died, and it's an ache you thought you'd long since beaten down and boarded up and poured cement over and built a rather impressive sky scraper over. It would be unpleasant to kick his smart ass to the curb and essentially his demise.

But your eyes reveal nothing, and eventually he sighs dejectedly. "Okay, fine. I'm _sorry_ ," and although he puts unneccisarry emphasis on the apology, you hear a hint of sincerity in his voice (a demon who's shit at lying, only you would be so lucky). "I won't eat the last….well, anything again, okay?"

You pat him firmly on the head exactly twice, and he swats your hand away sharply with his tail before floating off to the bedroom, grumbling angrily all the while. When you return to the study, a mug of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in your hands, you can still hear him bumping around angrily in the bedroom, and although you're sure he's going to leave dents in the wallpaper, you can't help but smile.


	3. Restless

You tend to be a bit of a shut-in. Between major cases, so long as the pantry is stocked the the power is on, you can go weeks without setting foot outside the apartment. It doesn't bother you; you have just as much distaste for humans as you do the arcane, and it's better for you to stay inside with your books and television and manuscripts. The pantry isn't even half way empty, but you're still pushing your cart down the aisles, looking at the produce with a scrutinizing eye.

As scared as he was to go outside, Sollux was starting to get so restless he was driving you up the wall. He would flit from room to room, looking at the spines of texts and opening and closing cupboards whilst sighing quietly (just not quietly enough) before moving on and eventually repeating the ritual. It was making you break out in hives and you were only too eager to shepherd him out of the building under the guise of grocery shopping. Quick enough, but hopefully enough fresh air to calm his nerves a little.

Your suspicions about him are confirmed as he clings to the lapels of your jacket, letting your steps pull him along after you, taking in the sky scrapers, the homeless crowding the streets, the people unwittingly pulling their own demons along with them as the trek. He regards everything with a disgusted kind of detached fascination, like he's fascinated to be out in the midst of the clammer of the human realm, but glad he doesn't have to deal with it on a daily basis.

There's a particularly powerful spirit on a slumped woman in the supermarket who regards canned soup with glazed eyes. The black shadow turns hollow sockets in your direction, and although you can't see his face, you can feel the flare of psychic energy and hear the angry hiss over your head. Your lips quirk upwards, but you continue past without saying anything.

"Aren't you going to do something?" Sollux asks, not releasing your jacket but turning around to watch the black shadow and his captive fade from sight. "I mean, that's kind of your job, right?"

You pick up a head of lettuce, trying to look through the shrink wrapping and the fog on your glasses at the quality of the vegetable. "No, 's not my job. I'm not responsible for every little emotion persuader I run in to; I'm a big fish fryer, but I ain't gotta clean up after every mess. I gotta keep the balance, an' that one wasn't threatenin' the balance."

The demon curls over your head, his messy hair hanging loose as he meets your gaze, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that he's upside down and completely halting your perusal of the food in your hands. You can feel his knees nudging the back of your head, and his eyes are really quite stunning from so close.

"What about me?"

You consider. He's powerful, and despite his small stature, there's an almost feline quality to his muscles and the way he moves. A grace born from barely coiled deadly ability just under the surface. But despite this, he's never tried to harm you aside from empty threats and bickering over cereal or how much curry powder to use in the stir fry. Reality television fascinates him, and your old desktop in the office is his new found love. He complains when you make him finish his vegetables and is restless in his sleep. He's simultaneously dangerous and absolutely harmless.

"You're a necessary evil," you answer eventually.

He regards you, eyes unblinking and burning in to yours, and you sincerely hope your silence wasn't quite this long because it's really quite awkward and people can actually see you. His fingers slide up the collar of your coat to comb in to the hair on the back of your neck, pressing a surprisingly genuine smile to your own perpetual frown. His lips are smooth, hot, and barely-there before he drifts away towards the freezer section looking very damn pleased with himself.

You press your knuckles to your burning cheeks, the phantom sensation of his warmth and the grip on your coat keeping you paralyzed until you manage to toss the lettuce in to the shopping cart without any further inspection. You'd best track him down before he steals all the ice cream in the market.


	4. Snowflake

You go out by yourself sometimes.

Never far, never without making sure he sees you leave through the window or removes the door wards himself. He acts aloof, pretends he doesn't care, but even the briefest hint of your mistress's aura was potent enough to put the same fear you have in to him, and it's always with a hint of trepidation in his violet eyes that he watches you go over the railing and down in to the streets below.

There's a park near his apartment, not terribly big or terribly nice, but it's the largest expanse of greenery you've ever seen in your life. Things Down There are charred and rocky and brown and red and black; what few trees still stand are gnarled and ashy, more demons themselves than trees. Although it's winter, the pines still have all their needles, and the bark on the naked trees is still healthy and alive under your fingertips. You float over to the pond, dragging your toes against the frozen surface and sometimes causing a crack or two (you know the further Down you go the colder it gets, but you're not nearly strong enough to survive there; you stayed where the sulfur burned your eyes and you couldn't stand in one place for too long lest you get singed, but that's neither here nor there).

Your kind rarely make the earth their home. It's a work place; there's more than enough misery to go around, psychosis and depression to feed off of and nurture and grow in to murders and suicides. It can make or break a demon's career, but it's not where they stay; it's always back Down There as soon as their stomach is full or they get a whiff of something stronger on their tail. You don't know much about your own culture, being as young as you are, but you're intelligent enough to realize that your situation is far from normal.

But despite the lack of burning warmth and tortured screams and evil tickling the back of your neck like an always present electrical storm, you don't feel uncomfortable in this world. Maybe your unique situation Down There with your mistress makes you more likely to be happy wherever she isn't, but regardless, you have a roof over your head and a rather powerful ally (you think) so you aren't about to look too deeply in to it.

As your tail idly draws signs in the frost forming on top of the lake, a rather large, fluffy snowflake lands on your nose and makes you sneeze. Your absentmindedness means the entire frozen surface is covered with gyroscopic pictures, and you're glad that the snow is coming down hard enough to cover the designs before anyone could see. It'd probably cause an uproar and Eridan would try and drown you in the bathtub.

You can't feel the tips of your ears as you approach the apartment complex, but you pause before flying up to the window. A large amount of snow has accumulated on the stoop of the building, and you scoop up a huge double handful before heading up to the window. It takes a bit of maneuvering to try and get it open, especially with melting snow trickling down your bare arms, but your tail is stronger than it looks and with a blast of warm air you're inside.

He's sitting in his office, a bit of ink smudged on his nose just beneath the bridge of his glasses, and he's frowning at the book propped open in front of him. If you floated there, unmoving, you'd be able to watch his glasses slide ever so slowly down his face until he has to push them back up and run his fingers through his hair (like he always does). There's something incredibly attractive about such a weak being so incredibly strong, so that's why it's with a great sense of forbidding that you approach him.

"Did you have a nice walk?" he asks with genuine disinterest.

"Uh-huh," you reply cheerfully as you shove your snow-filled hands down the back of his sweater, and although your black eye makes you fly a bit wonky for the rest of the week, the shrill scream you got beforehand was more than worth it.


	5. Haze

He's been running a fever for the past two days.

He doesn't feel feverish at all to you, but that could be largely attributed to your higher than normal body temperature and protectively thick skin; he just feels pleasantly warm, like an animal that's been sunning in the window. His attitude has taken a turn for the worse, but he seems to be coming out on the other end of the behavior spectrum.

He also hasn't been out of bed since yesterday morning.

You've been doing the best you can; demons don't exactly have good nurturing skills, and he's not even your species. Anything that might make you feel better may only make him worse. So you bring him what he asks for, which was at first a lot, but has dwindled down to cold clothes and glasses of lukewarm water. It was nice to have him quiet down, but the silence grates uneasily on your nerves, and despite having the freedom to eat and watch whatever you want, it doesn't seem as sweet without him screaming in horror at the drivel you enjoy on television or the sheer amount of ice cream you can consume in one sitting.

He's sleeping fitfully when you check on him; the blankets have been mostly kicked off, and his shirt has ridden up to expose his stomach. His hair is in disarray and his glasses are nowhere to be seen; it makes for a rather uncharacteristic image. You gather the blankets, making to put them back in their rightful place only to be abruptly seized by the collar of your shirt.

His movements were fast, but not aggressive, so although you feel your powers flare a bit in response, there's no immediate danger on his part. His eyes are lidded and there's sweat beading on his hairline, and as you hang in the hair above him, blankets clutched loosely in your fingertips, he licks his lips in a rather enticing way.

"Don't go," he says, grip white-knuckled in the fabric of your shirt, his gaze unfocused to the point that you get the distinct sensation that he's not look at you; not really. He's grumpy, frumpy, and bossy, but his voice sounds small and lost, his expression so vulnerable you wonder what kind of nightmare he's still half stuck in. You wonder who he thinks you are.

Rather than pry his fingers lose, you guide the blankets back in to place with blue and red tendrils, letting your forehead rest against his. It takes almost no concentration to stay hovering just above him, your bodies not quite touching, but the contact between your faces seems to be enough; his hand grasps yours where it rests comfortably on his bony chest and his eyes shutter closed.

His even breaths brush across your lips, and it would be a wonderful time to take advantage of him, but something about the loose, clammy grip of his fingers and the mournful tone of his voice keeps your nature in check, and before long you find yourself slipping in to slumber along with him. You just hope you can keep yourself afloat while you dream; you don't want to explain to him why you crash land on top of him in the middle of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Augh, I can't believe I'm falling behind already! No post yesterday because I worked a killer shift and came home and passed out for about twelve hours, and then right when I was about to post tonight the power went out! Sweet lord, I hope nothing else goes wrong for a while.


	6. Flame

The snow is almost ankle-deep this far outside the town, and the cuffs of your pants are drenched and sticking to your socks in a most unpleasant way. Despite the freezing temperatures, your hair is limp with sweat and the once comfortable weight of your coat feels suffocating. Your face is half hidden in your scarf, eyes squinted at the blue and red flames engulfing the small house in front of you.

Sollux floats next to you, arms crossed as he surveys the fire, and you hope he's keeping the sparks in check; the last thing you need is for the forrest to burn down around your ears. Despite the cold, he's still dressed in his usual attire of black t-shirt, black jeans, and black shoes, not seeming to be affected by the icicles starting to form on the tips of his horns.

The cult was one you've been tracking for weeks, since around the time your housemate arrived, and when the opportunity to squish their activities before a gate could be opened, you jumped at the chance. Sollux said he merely wanted to come as a spectator, but the idea of being passive left his mind completely when he saw the naked, emaciated, and bruised girl bleeding out on the floor.

They were a small cult; no one was going to miss them, Terezi would make sure of that (so long as she wasn't made aware of your…help). You scuffed out the summons chalked on the rotten floorboards with the toe of your shoe, unable to feel the warm sensation at the back of your mind that hinted at Sollux's whereabouts. The bodies of the men (and woman) involved had been laid neatly along the inside wall, whereas the girl remained at the center, covered with a dirty sheet that you're sure must have been pulled from the closet.

You don't have to tell him to torch the place, or even ask if he has the ability. He's a demon; fire and brimstone and all that lovely stuff is in his nature. It would be appalling to even question his talents. His tail is curled up close to his body as he studies the burning hovel, and the flare of power obscures his eyes from you, but his posture is of someone thinking quite hard about something.

Removing your hands from your pocket, you break the icicle off the tip of his horn and tap the tip of his nose with it. "My people are jus' as capable of doin' bad shit as yours are. An' in all my experience, which is a fuckin' lot, your kind is just as capable of doin' good in your own way."

He quirks an eyebrow at you, and you return the gesture with just a hint of a smile. When he sighs, the warmth of his breath melts the ice between your fingers, and the shock of cold water running down your forearm would have been a lot more surprising if his skin hadn't been so warm against yours. His tail curls in the pocket of your coat as he laces his fingers with yours, and you stand twined like that in silence as the fire burns it's self out.


	7. Formal

Your job is one that ends up requiring lots of replacements in your wardrobe, so you shop sensibly, buying things that are comfortable, professional, but cheap and runs no risk of you getting attached. Your outfits run down the middle of the road, nice enough to wear in to any nice neighborhood or restaurant that you please, but not so flashy that you turn heads in the more seedy parts of town. You learned long ago that brandishing your wealth and abilities is a good way to get someone killed, so it's best to wear colorless coats over your tastefully colored button downs and leave the flashy scarves that you used to love so much in the closet.

But tonight is the police station's fundraiser, and you're required to make an appearance. The other members of your scattered team will slither out from their shops and well-kept houses to wine and dine the elite of the city, as is practically required to keep doing what you do in the city. Without the approval of the well to do, your occasional traipses in to their mansions or boat houses would end with you either in prison or disappearing all together.

So when you emerge from the bathroom after nearly an hour of preparation work, Sollux fumbles his brownie-in-a-mug (some online trend, he didn't elaborate) and probably would have burned his hands something awful if he were a human.

You hardly fuss with your hair these days, letting the waves settle on your head as they please, but tonight you've managed to tame the mess in to perfect order, swept back behind your ears and out of your eyes in to an elegant disarray that took more time than you should probably admit to. Your suit is charcoal grey with off white pinstripes, and it fits like a dream even though it's been quite a while since it was fitted. The splash of color comes from the light purple button-down you wear under the vest, and you're in the process of tucking your deep violet tie beneath the buttoned fabric when you exit the bedroom, your suit jacket over your arm.

Sollux has abandoned his brownie-mug on the coffee table, his clawed fingers tracing the slight flare of your hips up to where the hem of the vest rests against your slacks. "You clean up good," he says, eyeing the knot resting against your throat.

"Well, that compliment just sweeps me off my feet," you retort sarcastically, a smirk playing at the corners of your lips, especially when you spot just a hint of red discoloring the pointed tips of his ears. You bat his hands away from your waist to slide in to the coat, only to be abruptly pulled forward as soon as the cloth has settled comfortably against your shoulders.

A half-formed protest is on your lips at the rough tug forward by your tie, but his mouth is hot, pointed teeth scraping ever so slightly against your skin, and you're very glad that he's floated up till he's taller than you because you're practically boneless against him. He kisses like he does everything else; with unbridled passion, ferocity, and a sense of awareness as to what he's doing. You're not concerned about his fangs or the deceptively powerful tail winding around your waist; he knows what he's doing, so you resign yourself to being kissed breathless.

He pulls away with your bottom lip still trapped between his teeth, licking teasingly once more before moving back to his brownie-mug. "Don't stay out too late."

You smooth a hand down the front of your jacket (buttoned in the heat of the moment, apparently) and run your tongue over the roof of your mouth with consideration. "That doesn't taste half bad," you say eventually, motioning to the mug now cradled in his hands, and he smiles cheekily at you as you make your way to the door.

You're fairly certain the party is going to end early, for you at least.


	8. Companion

The shop is just as cluttered as it always is, but everything has a place (you don't know where it is, she always does) and although dust glints in the afternoon sunlight filtering through the windows, the tables and various flat surfaces are spotless. You flip the sign to "closed" behind you, breathing in the scent of old wood, aged leather, and porcelain as you move towards the old desk that serves as a counter. The cash register doesn't work, never has, but it makes the area of payment obvious. She's sitting in a red-velvet, Victorian era chair, legs curled under the rest of her body as she holds a magnifying glass over the china tea cup resting in her palm.

"Didn' know you were in the market for a tea set."

Her lips curl, but her attention doesn't shift. "Do be quiet; this is a very old piece, and I'd hate for your poor attitude to have such a negative affect on it that it shatters in to a thousand glistening shards."

You roll your eyes, but it's not like there's anywhere else in the city you can take your business, and even if there was, you doubt that you'd be inclined to go there. Her attitude aside, Rose is the best in the business, and her eccentricities are expected of people in your professions. You're no less of an odd bird than she is, just a different sort. You stand with your hands in your pockets, attention on the stained glass window that dominates the back wall of the store as she turns the delicate cup over in her hands.

"Now, I doubt this is a social call; we just saw each other a week prior," Rose says, setting the cup somewhere in the desk before folding her hands in her lap, an eyebrow raised in placid curiosity.

You flick at an imaginary piece of dirt on the surface of her desk, not quite meeting her eyes. "I need somethin' ranged."

Her other eyebrow joins the first, black painted lips twisted in a mockery of a smile. "I'm sorry, I don't believe I heard you correctly. You want…what?"

"A ranged weapon. Somethin' I can use from a distance. How many ways do you want me to say it? I know you ain't stupid, despite how you may act sometimes."

She plants her hands on the desk surface, fingers splayed, moving forward until you can smell the spice of her perfume and count her eyelashes. "You don't use ranged weapons, Eridan. You've used the same knife, wonderful as it is, for the past ten years because you can't bear to give yourself that much room for error. You know how much responsibility is in your hands when you have that space between yourself and your opponent; there are so many more people who you can hurt that way. You know that."

One of her hands comes to your throat, nail scraping lightly against your skin as your breath stutters. "And we both know why you switched in the first place. You're out of control, you _want_ to be overwhelmed, and the only reason I feel comfortable putting a knife in your hands is because I know you're too much of a coward to turn it on yourself. What makes you think I'll give you what you want now, as opposed to ten years ago?"

You had been outside the shop, still covered in blood and barely able to stand, glasses shattered and clothes torn. Your weapon was gone, confiscated when you didn't manage to leave the scene in time, matched the wounds on the victim too perfectly to let you keep it no matter what the circumstances, and you'd sat on the pavement outside her store and screamed, begged, and threatened. The trash pouring out of your mouth should have been enough for her to kill you herself, but she just stood there, eyes sad and jaw clenched while you ripped her apart in every way you knew, but she never gave in. Not then, not in all the times since.

But the situation has changed, and she can tell. You don't flinch away or avert your gaze, and you support her slight weight leaning against your throat easily. Her hair tickles your cheeks, falling from behind her ears to brush your face, and when you blow a strand to lay across her nose, she smiles.

"The situation has changed."

You remove her hand, gently pushing her back in to the chair. "I got somethin' I wanna try to protect. I can't do that if the only way 'a lookin' after the people I care about is to try and run in to things head first."

"Well, technically he's not a people," she comments, and although you glower, you do nothing to rescind the statement. She's right, after all.


	9. Move

She was never with you in the apartment.

You used to have a town house, a little run-down thing that she'd chatter endlessly about fixing up; fixing the peeling red paint out front or pulling up the old wooden floor boards in the living room. The only repair you managed to make was the bedroom, which was sea foam green with the softest white carpet you'd ever seen in your life. You both sat on the floor, the house still empty, digging your toes and fingers in to the plush fibers. She'd rubbed her nose in it and laughed until you pushed her over with your foot.

But when she died, it was too hard to stay there. The cracks on the bannister, the scorch marks on the stove, the buckets of unopened paint; it all brought to mind her smile and her laugh and the way she would stew for days when she was pissed at you. It was like a butter knife someone was dragging back and forth over an open wound, ripping away anything before it could start to heal. You left everything there; all your clothes, all her clothes, all the papers and books and plates and fuzzy blankets and stuffed animals. It all burned, and something in you went with it; you regret it now, with every fiber of your being, but you'd just wanted to get away from her, to hide from her ghost.

You put off purchasing anything for the apartment; you figured you weren't much longer for the world yourself, so it'd just be a waste. But days turned to weeks, weeks to months, months to years, and it was impractical to try and live in a place with absolutely nothing. Even when you had things fully furnished, a new wardrobe settled in the closet and the cabinets filled with plates and food, it still didn't feel like home. It was someplace you stayed listlessly while you waited for your next case, not someplace you felt comfortable or safe.

But now, he greets you when you come back, be it from the grocery, the police station, or anywhere else. Sometimes he's mucking around in the kitchen, playing on his laptop, or lounging on the couch. He'll always turn his head, try his best to look disinterested, and say "welcome home". And that's what it finally feels like.


	10. Silver

"You got something weird in the mail today. It smells nice."

You hang your coat and scarf on the available pegs in the entry way, toeing off your boots as your roommate floats around the corner, beige package in his hands and barely contained curiosity in his glowing eyes. You brush the snow from your hair and make to wipe your glasses free of fog on the hem of your sweater; it makes him scowl rather predictably, and you smile as you hold your hand out.

"Prolly from Kar," you say, inhaling the scent of fragrant oils and incense under the dozens of postage stamps and stickers gained on the trip from the other side of the world. "He mentioned he was gonna send me somethin' in his last e-mail, but he didn' say what. Too small to be anythin' of much use."

"I thought you drove cars," Sollux says as he follows you in to the living room, hovering over the back of the couch as you flop down on to the well-worn cushions. His horns press against your cheek as he peers at the package, and you nudge him over a bit.

"Karkat," you clarify with a roll of your eyes, struggling with the layers of tape until the demon pulls it from your hands and slits along the fold with the tip of his claw. "He's a colleague of mine; worked here for a few years when we were teens before settin' up camp permanently in Medina. Doesn't like how people here looked at him cross-eyed, an' his area of expertise has always been the Middle East."

Sollux presses the envelope in to your hands, and the uneven weight prompts you to upend it over your open palm. With a barely audible tinkle, a long ribbon of silver with a pendant attached to it slithers out, feeling cool even against your chilled hands. It feels rough, reminiscent of the sand it probably spent most of its time surrounded by, but still shines brilliantly, and the bitter twang of metal mixes with the overwhelming spice when you lift it to your nose.

"A necklace?"

You turn the pendent over in your hands, and a smile flits across your lips. "Not just a necklace; a charm."

Sollux eyes the inscription carefully (he learned the hard way that just because the ward wasn't on paper didn't mean it was ineffective), not making any move to take it from you, but the curiosity is more obvious from this close. "Against me?"

You laugh, finding the clasp and unhooking it. "Actually, yes. This symbol is for "ajna", the sixth chakra, and stands for clarity an' insight. He thinks you've got me under some sort of enchantment. He's prolly hoping this'll snap me outta it and drown you in a tub of holy water or somethin'."

The glowing eyes next to yours widen a bit as you loop the chain around your neck, twisting the hooks to the front so you can fasten it. "But I didn't curse you," he says defensively as you tuck the cool metal under your sweater. "You'd know if I even so much as ate the last banana in the bunch, let alone try something malicious."

You don't say anything, and he squirms, moving over the couch to sit next to you, the tip of his tail prodding the small lump that rests against your sternum. "Is it…doing anything?"

Karkat's intuition is as spot-on as usual; anahata presses against your skin from the other side of the pendant, and you card your fingers through his wild hair, settling at the base of his left horn. "Not in the way you're thinkin'," you reassure, gentle pressure guiding him down to join your lips together, the warmth from your body thawing the cold metal until it feels like part of you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to apologize for the extended absence! I spent a night in urgent care and then had four papers to write for the end of my summer courses as well as a final. Between that and work, I've been too busy to breathe, but as things calm down before my classes start back at the end of August, I should be back to updating on a daily basis. If anyone has any questions about the symbolism in this chapter, please feel free to ask or to utilize Google! It's your friend.


	11. Prepared

Your apartment is never completely dark. There's always light coming from the computer in your study or the clocks on the microwave and stove, and the television is left on accidentally when Sollux passes out on the couch instead of coming to bed, bathed in a combination of late night television shopping advertisements and the faint blue from his computer screen. But as the wind howls outside and the rain spatters against the window panes loud enough to sound like gunshot, there isn't any light save for the pale crescent of the moon shining through the cracked curtains.

You're used to working in darkness, and your adaptation is better than most, but you usually have a flashlight, a match, a full moon, some sort of reliable lamination to keep you from tripping over your own feet. At least within the apartment you are unencumbered by the weight of your coat or heavy boots, but you still hesitate every time the ancient floorboards creak under your socked feet. The air in front of you fogs with your warm breath, and the hallway towards the bedroom seems incredibly long. There's no comforting red or blue glow, and it makes a frown pull your eyebrows down until they almost dislodge your glasses.

There's a rustle from the bathroom, the shower curtain wisping against the porcelain, and you move with more purpose now that you have an objective. Any moonlight leaking through your bedroom in to the hallway disappears when you enter the windowless bathroom, and you steel your nerves before yanking the curtain back to reveal the bathtub. Empty.

You're about to breathe a sigh of relief when a hundred pounds of dead weight falls right on to your back, and it's with a rather undignified shriek that you topple in to the tub, grappling with the curtain to try and remain upright only to yank the whole damn thing (rod and all) in with you. It's pure dumb luck that you don't knock yourself unconscious on the faucet, and the metal curtain rod makes such a racket hitting the floor in the complete silence that your ears ring.

The room is bathed in an uneven mix of blue and red, the weight on your back cackling like a madman as you try (and fail) to get up despite him being wrapped up with you in the plastic. "You should have seen your face!" he howls as you let your head drop, glasses scraping against the drain.

"Where _were_ you?" you ask incredulously, managing to twist your upper body until you can meet his eyes, glowing slightly brighter than usual and gleaming off his teeth bared in a gleeful grin.

"Over the door," he replies, rustling the curtain with his tail (the length of it wedged under your hips, and you hope your rather bony self is causing him quite a lot of pain). "I moved the curtain with my tail to lure you in."

"But how could you be above the door without me seeing you? Even just floating makes you glow like crazy."

He shreds right through the plastic liner in order to stand, brushing invisible dirt off his clothes as he looks at your prone form. You'd almost mistake his gaze for predatory if you weren't wearing a bathrobe, boxers with ducks on it, and currently swaddled in a goddamn shower curtain (ain't nothing attractive about that). "I closed my eyes," he answers simply. "Best two out of three?"

You pull the shower curtain up over your head, muttering obscenities as glowing fingers of energy try to pull the material away from you. Maybe if you're lucky, the power will come back on before he leaves you permanently maimed.


	12. Knowledge

Although they try to act deceitful, when you've been in the business as long as you have, demons are scarily easy to see through.

They can lie and cheat and seduce better than any human being, but their outsides always reflect their insides. A female far too pretty to be real, batting her eyelashes and licking her lips, embodies lust; a genderless being, round and hungry-eyed embodies gluttony; a man decked in the best clothes money can buy embodies greed. Even when they rise from the ashes of human sin they're born from, demons fall under a patron deadly, and as they grow and feed and conquer and kill, they grow more and more in to that trait.

You'd pegged Sollux as sloth. His horns, curved like a ram, point to a demon made for defense. He lacks the visible animal traits a demon more inclined towards conflict tends to have, like paws or hooves. His claws are sharp, his tail is powerful enough, but even at his angriest he doesn't look terribly dangerous. There's no doubt he spawned within the last ten years or so.

But his powers speak of an active class, like wrath, and you really would rather not face him in a fight. Although you have no doubt they can be used defensively, you've only ever seen him use his powers offensively, cleaving through opponents with little care. There are demons tiers above him who would undoubtedly shit their pants if confronted by this little pipsqueak who picks the carrots out of his dinner.

He completely baffles you. Although he's lazy, you've also seen him enraged, definitely lustful, gluttonous when it comes to the ice cream, envious of the fancy computers he sees on television, proud of his customizations to your desktop, and greedy, because when you give an inch you always give a mile. He doesn't fall under just one deadly; he exhibits all of them, just like a human. He enjoys things that aren't strictly sinful in nature, like puttering around in the kitchen to help you with breakfast or expressing an interest in learning Aramaic.

You wonder if it's because he's so young, but even the most facile and influenceable demons you've encountered don't display the kind of compassion or range of emotion that he possesses. The dual nature of his appearance and powers only lend to the oddity, and you're fairly certain he's one of a kind. It's no surprise that someone particularly fucked up down there tried to get their claws in to him, and as you see him sitting on the couch, sucking the honey off his spoon after stirring the contents in to his tea, you can't help but feel protective of you. This is some kind of evolutionary fluke, and somehow it tumbled in to your hands.

So although you're in the business of killing demons, you find yourself dedicated completely to the protection of a very different one.


	13. Denial

You married her when she was only sixteen.

You were eighteen, still shrugging out of your graduation robes when she ambushed you in the empty science classroom, all pink frills and bright eyes and huge, too-white smile. She'd twined her arms around your waist under the formless black fabric and buried her face against your neck, and as you cradled her against you, breathing in the scent of her shampoo and perfume, you slipped the ring on to her finger.

Her parents were thrilled to sign her away to you. You've known her since she was born, have vague, pastel-colored memories of sitting in the crib next to the tiny bundle with more hair than any baby probably should have. Her father worked at the same university as your mother, and Feferi was brought up in the family trade: demonology and dead languages, whereas you learned to fire a gun before you knew how to read. Her skills lay in identifying languages, translating papers, pinpointing weak points, and jotting down notes on anything strange she encountered.

But living together was very different from going to the same school or hanging out over the weekend. Her late-night reading kept you awake, and your fits of righteous anger were less endearing when she didn't have anywhere to go to get away from them. She tried to talk to you about the problems she was having, anxiety at the lifestyle the two of you were living, courting death before really getting a chance to live. She wanted to travel, study abroad, do anything besides sit cooped up in the office and track down demons.

But you didn't know how to do anything else, be anything else, so you waved her off and pretended not to hear when she would cry in the bathroom when you'd come home covered in blood. You didn't flinch when she stitched you up with more force than necessary, and held her close at night even when she would elbow you in the ribs to try and get away.

She was your everything, what you've loved even before you knew what love really was. All you want to do is make her happy, but confronted with the misery she seemed to be suffering through every day, you turned away. You couldn't accept that you couldn't give her what she wanted, so instead chose to pretend that everything was okay, just like it had been when you were just kids, trading kisses in the stairwell at school and braiding her hair and feeding her strawberries in the summer.

You fought more and more over increasingly stupid things. Everything you did or said irritated her, and instead of shrugging off her snide comments and backhanded compliments, you would yell and rage and, eventually, throw a dinner plate at the door next to her. She left, tears and genuine fear in her eyes, and you sat in the kitchen floor, the linoleum cold against your legs as you tried to figure out how you'd let it get this bad.

A call came in, and your head wasn't where it needed to be, you were distracted, worried, and upset; you should have let your father handle it, called Karkat or Rose, but you're too stubborn to let people think you're weak, so there you stand, shotgun heavy in your hands as you track the movements of the creature flitting through the trees. It's hard to shoot a moving target, but you've had this gun since you could lift it, and as you follow the next clear jump, muzzle steady and finger tightening, pink and black files in to your vision, but it's too late.

There was blood everywhere, soaking your clothes and smudging your glasses, and the cry of the vanishing monster was eclipsed by the sound torn from your throat as she lay dead in your arms, and it was completely, undeniably your fault.


	14. Wind

When being pursued, the absolute last place you want to go us up.

In almost every action/horror movie, the protagonist flees up the stairs of an apartment complex, dilapidated old house, or apartment building and becomes trapped on the roof with nowhere to go but straight down to asphalt below.  Feferi always told you that you would be the first one to die in a zombie apocalypse because your ability to remember basic self-preservation facts when in the heat of the moment is absolute shit.  You don't freeze up, forget to run or raise your weapon, but little things like "cell phones won't help you call for back up after you jump in the lake" or "bullets don't work against creatures that have no corporeal form".

Your calves are burning as you sprint up the stairs, the air stale and freezing in your lungs.  The dust is so thick on your lenses you can hardly see, and the fragile metal  steps rattle with the weight of your pursuer as you hurtle out the door and on to the snow-covered rooftop.  The wind is so strong that even the heavy weight of your trench coat is flung about wildly in the gale.  At least your glasses are cleaner even if your right arm is almost pinned to your side.  Your pursuer hurtles through the open doorway like an ox, his breath fogging as it rushes out of his nose.  The wisp of a woman holding on to his shoulders meets your gaze blankly, and her grip on the man seems effortless, like she could reign in all that brute strength with just her little finger.  You don't doubt that she could.

There's blood crusted on your lips and chin, nose at an absolutely grotesque angle and glasses holding on just barely by a thread.  You can take a punch with the best of them, but this man hit like a berserker.  It's very possible that not only is your nose broken, but your cheekbones are fractured and a tooth or two might be missing.  You're too numb from adrenaline to be able to tell.

The man is sweating profusely through the thin t-shirt he's wearing, like the cold doesn't even touch him, and his head is lowered like a beast about to charge as he backs you against the railing.  He's too strong, too _aware_ for you to take down with ease like a person possessed should be.  The woman slips from his back to float at his side, head cocked in her companion's direction as she smoothes long, dark hair behind his ear.

"We're not hurting anyone."  Even with the wind whistling in your ears, you can make out her voice, soft but sweet as spun sugar, as clearly as if her lips were brushing your skin.

"Your presence is certainly hurtin' him, you damn parasite," you spit, the taste of blood heavy on your tongue.

"You don't know what you're talking about," the man roars, jerking towards you, but the pale hand on his shoulder keeps him from charging.  "I give to her willingly, she takes nothing I don't offer first."

Her white eyes narrow, the black of her eyelashes stark against the lack of pupil or iris.  "Does he look coerced?  Like I've bewitched him like the other of my kind are known to do?"

Doubt niggles at the back of your mind, and although the man is stronger than any human you've come up against, his gaze (although hidden) is clear, his motions deliberate and precise.  There's no haze of lust keeping his focus on the woman to his left, because although he's aware of her presence, it doesn't appear that he's there just under her command.  Likewise, she isn't the self-indulgent creature of red lips and lidded gazes that you associate with the demons of lust.  There's possessiveness in her stance, but she looks just as prepared to protect him as he is to protect her.  She's not furious at the aspect of losing her meal ticket; she's worried about someone who she coexists with and has come to care about.

It makes your stomach hurt and your grip turn white-knuckled on your knife.  Sollux is the only exception to the rule; you can't afford to think in terms of other demons existing who don't adhere to the strict stereotypes of their society.  If there's more than just one, demons who think and feel and reason and exist outside your desires, then that changes absolutely everything.  It's hard not to picture yourself and your demon in the same position, fighting against the closed-minded people who think he's using you when all evidence says that he's not.

"I can't let you go," you say, the wind so cold that it burns in your lungs as you pant, trying simultaneously to catch your breath while not hyperventilating.  "I can't take that chance."

The woman's face hardens, and her hand falls away from the man's shoulder, and you barely register him moving before you're tumbling over the railing.  He lifted you like you weighed next to nothing, your back didn't even touch the frost-covered metal before you're plummeting, the wind tearing at your clothes in one direction while the force of your body falling down, down pulls it another.  You hit something hard, bony, and the force of your sudden stop almost yanks your shoulder right out of the socket, but it doesn't register as you gape up at the flares of red and blue just over your head.

"What am I gonna do with you," he sighs, hoisting you up until you're supported by his arms around your waist instead of his fingers around your wrist.  Your vision clears enough that you can make out the dark curls and glaringly white eyes peering at you over the ledge.  She studies you and the demon baring his teeth in warning, and a flicker of understanding passes over her face before she disappears.  You already know that they'll be gone by the time you stop trembling enough to give chase, so you don't even really think about it a Sollux drifts slowly towards the ground.

The wind stings the tips of your ears, and although it makes your face throb, you hide your face against the warm column of his neck.  His fingers are warm where they thread in to your hair, and the howl of the gale is drowned out by the steady beating of his heart.


	15. Order

"He's really quite terrible at keeping his books alphabetized."

Given the nature of the beast (read, you), you'd never expected to meet any of Eridan's friends. You even doubted that he had friends. Not only because his personality is an acquired taste, but because his job demands it. You know about Karkat far, far away, and have inklings about the love he lost, but the blond woman wearing an oversized t-shirt and stained sweatpants in the middle of his study is a surprise. Her hair is just barely too short to pull back, and she has it held out of her eyes with a bright green headband that clashes hysterically with her maroon school spirit shirt.

"My wife almost didn't let me out of the house this morning," she says when she notices you staring, pushing a tower of books out of the way to make room next to her on the carpet. "I'm just going to be getting musty and dusty but even still, she was having kittens when I left."

You float over and drop to the floor next to her, looking up at the books slowly taking order on the shelves above her. Each shelf has a different type of book, divided first by language and then by subsection (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Demonology, and so on). It's nothing close to the jumbled mess of books that were lucky to all have the spines facing out, and Eridan would spend hours looking for just one text all the while swearing under his breath and running his fingers through his hair angrily.

"You can read all of those?" you ask, gesturing vaguely to the Hebrew texts currently in her hands.

"Read, but not speak. Eridan has always had an affinity for languages, and it's more useful for him to verbalize the words than myself," she answers, stretching slightly to place the next book in it's proper place. "Everyone in our field has to be multi-lingual."

You hum in answer, handing her books from the piles to your right that she can't reach and surveying the chipped pink polish on her fingernails and the kiss of black on the inside of her wrist. "I don't bother you?" you ask, genuinely curious. Eridan had made quite obvious that other people of his persuasion wouldn't be as indulgent as he was.

She rests her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, studying you with an intense gaze that makes you a little uncomfortable. "I think if I'd just walked in here without any prior knowledge, I may be disturbed, but I know you won't try to hurt me or anyone I love. You're different, but a system can have outliers before it fails completely. You don't threaten my world view either."

She pauses, cocks her head to the side, and smiles wickedly. "That, and while Eridan doesn't have the best judge of character, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't be nearly so smitten with you if you were a danger to anyone."

The chatter fades again, and although the silence is comfortable while the two of you focus on restoring order to Eridan's travesty of an office, the flush never quite leaves your face.


	16. Thanks

The weather has changed the snow to slush and mud, and it's been raining on and off all week, leaving the wooded areas outside the city in to rather difficult to navigate swamps. The rain has you drenched to the bone, your thick coat not enough to keep the rain from soaking through to your shirt and eventually to your skin. It weighs a metric ton, and it really shouldn't surprise you that eventually the added weight of sodden wool pulls you in to the mud below.

You'd been on the offensive, the revolver clasped in your surprisingly steady hands, but when the world tilted and the mud splattered your glasses, the lumbering mass twisted, moving faster than anything that large had any right to, it's large, meaty palm pressing you in to the sludge.

You'd been tracking the demon for the past couple of days, having moved from just feeding off the energy of humans to literally feeding off the humans. When the disappearances stacked up, you'd been called in, and interrupted the demon, barely human at this point, in the process of cleaning the meat off a still-living woman's arm. Gluttonous demons aren't made for combat, and he fled from the back alley in to the woods, which leads to where you are now, trying to suck air through the increasingly heavy pressure on your ribs.

There's a haze of blue and red over the demon's shoulder, and you kind of gurgle something that sounds like "back the fuck up", but your companion obviously ignores you as he races towards you, only to be swatted out of the sky like a gnat. You hear the squelch of him hitting the ground, and a thud that sounds like a tree assisted in his deceleration.

The creature has it's attention divided, and you plant your feet as firmly as you can in the mud and heave your torso upwards, gaining the space you need to roll out of the way (and send the demon stumbling when you get out of the way; even such a small distance is significant when you're nothing but a blob of fat and muscle). Your knife cuts through his skin like hot butter, and the gash at the back of his knee sends the creature down howling.

A stump-like foot lashes out towards you, but there's a flash of heat and the appendage never makes contact, leaving you the opportunity to put a bullet in his stomach. With a hiss like carbonation being released from a soda can, a black vapor climbs towards the sky, the body deflating like a grotesque balloon. Sollux ambles over to you, the right side of his face bruised but otherwise appearing unaffected.

"Thanks," he says, a scowl settled firmly on his face. "He just smacked me right outta the sky."

"Not used to fighting things with that kind of reach," you laugh, putting your gun in your coat pocket after engaging the safety. "I'm kinda glad, though; you saving me all the time was gettin' embarrassin'."

He looks like he's considering pressing against your side, but wrinkles his nose as he takes in the leaves and dirt still clinging to your coat. "I'm sure you could have taken care of yourself, but if I can keep you from getting hurt, I'm not going to let your pride get in the way of that."

You shuck off the coat (not that it was doing much good, as wet as it was), and the two of you trek back to the apartment arm in arm, the rain fizzling off the umbrella he's created over your heads.


	17. Look

You hadn't realized how old he looked.

All things considered, he's not that old for a human; not even at what they'd consider the half-way point in his life. You've not met many other humans, but you know Rose and her wife Kanaya are about the same age as him, and while they certainly show the stress from their professions, it's not etched in to their bones and the lines of their face like it is with Eridan.

He's bleary and fuzzy-headed when you help him back in to the apartment. You're glad he's not wearing a coat or scarf, because you doubt he would have been able to work the buttons to remove it himself. He lost his glasses during the fight, and although you know he didn't sustain any injuries beside getting clocked in the head, he still stumbles in to sit down heavily on the edge of his bed.

He picks uselessly at the laces of his boots until you bat his hands away, and although his eyes are on the top of your head, you know he's not really looking at you. The boots are easy enough to remove, and his socks slide off with them, the fabric catching on his toes for a long moment before falling free as you settle the heavy shoes next to his nightstand.

There's more grey in his hair than there was when you started living with him; it's easier to tell when it's in messy disarray like it is now. The circles under his eyes are permanent, might as well be drawn in with Sharpie or tattooed in to his skin for how much of a constant they are. The worry lines between his eyebrows aren't just there when he frowns or comes across an unfamiliar word in his translation work; they mar the otherwise smooth skin, and you can see the parenthesis forming around his mouth from the way the corners of his lips are almost always perpetually pulled down.

His profession demands physical prowess, but as you run your hands down his calves, stripping the dark-washed jeans off his mostly unresponsive form, you can tell that it's a far cry from what he used to be. You still don't want to end up on the wrong end of his knife, but you can practically feel the muscles atrophying, because he's got stork legs already and a xylophone ribcage, and the activity despite the exhaustion is draining him.

You wonder if demon hunters can retire. Or quit.

Stripped down to his underwear and tucked under the thick quit that still adorns the bed even though the weather has warmed completely, you feel a hollow little ache forming in your chest at the thought of him doing this alone for so long. He would have stumbled home in the dark, alone, to not even make it as far as the bedroom, sleeping on the couch in his clothes until he wakes up practically sick with hunger and dehydrated. You're going to wake him up in a few hours and get some water in to him at the very least, and hopefully some crackers of some sort as well.

You brush the hair off his forehead with surprisingly gentle fingers, and he turns his face in to your palm, his eyelashes fluttering against your thumb. It feels too warm under the blankets, but you curl around him anyways, thumbing his sharp hipbones as you murmur promises of an easier life in to his ear, spoken in a language you're certain even he doesn't understand.


	18. Summer

The sticky heat is familiar and foreign at the same time.

Down Below it's always hot (at least where you are), but it's a dry heat, that leaves your throat dry and your skin feeling like it would flake away at the slightest touch. Out here, there's a thickness to the air, where it sticks in your lungs and leaves your shirt sticking to your sweaty skin. It feels like you're walking in an aquarium, the heat distorting the shore before you until the sun finally set, taking some of the oppression with it.

There's nothing like the ocean Down Below. For once, you're walking on your own two feet at Eridan's side, the tide lapping at your ankles as your toes sink in to the wet sand. It had taken all of three seconds upon leaving the car before you rolled up your pants, tossed your shoes haphazardly on the dunes, and practically dove in. The only thing keeping your head above the waves is the fact that demons have absolutely no reason to learn how to swim, and you don't feel like testing how well your powers work in the water.

The coast is rockier than tourists like, so the two of you are alone, with more stars shining over your head than you ever saw in the city. There's a milky whiteness twisting along between the stars, almost like a river, and you can follow it down to the edge of the horizon where it continues to wrap around the Earth, and it's startling how tiny it makes you feel.

Eridan is wearing shorts for the first time, even though it's been depressingly hot for the past month or so. His lightweight purple button-down is opened and flapping at his sides, glasses misted from the salt and spray. Anything he attempted to do to his hair has long since been mussed, and the strands are wild, sticking up at odd angles and flopping in his eyes. He looks wild, untamed, and you wonder if he'd look like this more often if he'd been raised in a different family. Even the strong lines of his shoulders are relaxed as he toes the shells in his path, stopping to pick up the ones that glint prettily in the moonlight.

"What kind of shell is that?" you ask, your tail leaving ripples in it's wake as it twitches lazily in the water.

The shell in his palm is smaller than your thumbnail, shining almost iridescent in the faint light and curling around in an increasingly tight swirl. "It's called a baby's ear. This part right here," he traces the design of the shell, starting at the point where the lines start to curve out, "looks a lot like an ear. They call it a baby's ear because it's so small."

His skin is slightly sticky from the ocean spray, but undeniably soft under your fingertip as you trace the whorl of his ear, stroking the tip when you come to it. "Your ears are pretty small."

He mimics the motion, pinching the tip of your much longer ear in a way that tickles more than it hurts. "We can't all have elf ears, y'know."

He tastes like the saltwater taffy you got from the booth in the parking lot, and there's no tension lingering in his neck when you tangle your fingers in his wind-swept hair. It should feel stifling to have him so close, but the warmth that washes over you is so pleasant, and with the waves lapping at your legs, you don't ever want to get back in the car and go back to the suits that make him look so old and the phone calls that make his shoulders hunch.

The longing in his eyes as you rub your thumb against his sharp cheekbones suggests he feels the same way.


	19. Transformation

The air is thick, hanging in the unbearable heat of the warehouse like a scratchy wool blanket. You've never even swam before, but the overwhelming moisture in the air makes you feel like you're drowning, and the oppressive darkness despite the glare of your eyes is making your hair stand on end. If it weren't for your tail around his wrist, you'd have no idea where Eridan was, and of all the things wrong with the situation, that's the thing that scared you the most.

In your time living with him, you've not accompanied him on a high-stakes mission. The cults, the gluttonous demons, the lustful, androgynous figures sucking people dry were hardly enough to phase you. You were born and lived Down There; such horrors meant little to you, so when Eridan had sat in the living room and painted symbols on his forearms and pulled out a positively ancient pair of spectacles, you'd been positive he was being paranoid. There was nothing he could show you on the human planet that would disturb you.

But clearly you were wrong.

It was an amalgamation of one big fish and all the little ones he could lure in to the pond. Even Eridan was unsure what alignment the main personality had started out as, but there were humans thrown in to the mass of flesh you'd glimpsed before the darkness overwhelmed you. It was disgusting, the smell made your stomach roil, and even the disappearance of your sight doesn't eclipse the vision burned in to your eyes; of flesh smooth and milky white, decaying and blackened in other parts, with the gnashing teeth and horns of demons mingling with the open mouths and tear-stained faces of the humans. There were limbs everywhere, most too weak to support the sheer girth of the creature, but some had twisted together, arms wrapped around each other in a truly grotesque way, several hands splayed in a mockery of fingers to help keep it off the ground.

Under the skin of your tail, you can feel Eridan's pulse, calm despite the fact that you know he can see the creature unobscured. The glasses must be warded, to help slice away the darkness and clear his vision, and you're pitifully glad that you can't see a damn thing. A rumble seems to shake the rotten floorboards, and you can feel it moving, shifting towards the two of you, and there's a disgusting, moist sound when it opens its mouths.

_You still have the tool of her destruction._

It speaks in the back of your mind, like someone's lips pressed intimately to the back of your skull where the tubes of your ears run, and it's so familiar to the way your mistress preferred to speak to you that it makes the nausea lurch ten-fold. The creature doesn't speak with a single voice, but with the low, smooth speech of a male demon and the silky soprano of a female, twisted with the screams and groans of the humans it took in to it's body, a truly appalling cacophony of sound.

The words it speaks makes you remember Rose, on the doorstep the night before the two of you left for the mission, a heavy, bloodstained shotgun in her delicate hands. Eridan hadn't looked at you, kept his gaze hidden, but you didn't miss the way he flinched back from it, hands trembling as he lifted the weight of it. Although you'd never seen the weapon before, he still moved with confidence, familiarity, like the bulky gun was an extension of himself, and you can't help but feel that this answers more questions about the woman he had at his side long before you were even born.

You feel his pulse kick up, his skin clammy under the tight hold of your tail, but his voice is smooth when he answers. "I need a little more firepower than my pistol to take care of something as fuckin' huge as you."

_How confident are you in your aim?_

There's a horrible, grating sound, like bones grinding against each other, and the lurch of movement from the hulking mass in front of you startles you, because something that big shouldn't be able to move that _fast_. But contrary to your initial suspicions, it doesn't move towards Eridan, but lurches to the left, moving around you rather than towards you, and it was like flipping a switch.

Eridan moves so fast and with such strength that you don't even have a hope of holding on, are actually pulled towards the space where he once was at the force of which he tugs free of your hold, and the first explosion of sound from his weapon almost deafens you, and when the human voices start screaming, begging for mercy, you almost wish it had.

The darkness is lifting, and two shots later you can actually make him out, and although your first instinct is to fly to him, red and blue blazing and ready to lash out, to protect, but his eyes are hard, bubbling with anger and hatred and hurt under the surface. But despite the tumult, he's standing on the heaving mass of flesh, steady as if his feet were planted on concrete, looking down the barrel of the gun at the gaping maw of the demon at the center of it all, fingers moving smoothly as he reloads.

"A lot more confident than I used to be," he snarls, and when he pulls the trigger there's blood everywhere, red mixing with truly toxic black, and the smell is acrid and burnt and almost crippling. It doesn't seem to bother Eridan, who leaps down from the corpse and strides over to you, and it feels like you're catching a glimpse of the man he used to be, strong and unafraid and terrifyingly beautiful. A true force to be reckoned with.

And then he trips over a piece of debris and crashes in to you, and it's so fitting that it has you laughing in to the collar of his shirt despite how inappropriate it may be given the situation. Rather than get offended, he just sighs, loud and long-suffering, before pulling you along after him as he leaves the warehouse for home, cradling the shotgun like it was something he'd missed, a part of him that he'd cut off and been too afraid to touch till now.

It sits in the study, leaned against his desk, and it feels like a wound that's finally being allowed to heal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to apologize for my extended absence. For some reason, this chapter's prompt gave me a lot of trouble, and I eventually had to sit down and just power through it, and I'm altogether content with the result.


	20. Tremble

You're always afraid to touch him.

He's extraordinarily capable, even for a human, and you know the raw strength housed within his body. Despite his garish eating habits, he's almost appallingly thin with thick cords of muscle laying so close to the skin that you can feel the tendons when he shifts underneath you. Scars litter his body, like you knew they would; no one fights as much as he does and escapes without something to show for it. There are more normal looking ones, cuts from knives or slashes that look like claws, but there are some that are ugly, twisted looking things that appear to have healed wrong, are blackened around the edges or turned his skin grey. You know those are marks of his profession, of his strength to overcome beings that are literally toxic for him to be around, but it doesn't loosen the knot in your stomach to see someone so strong so naked, damaged, and vulnerable under your fingers.

You know he thinks he's too old to be considered attractive. Although he's not anywhere near what humans would consider elderly, there's a certain absence of youth there, in the wrinkles formed from his constant frowning and the way he squints when he's been reading for too long. The grey shooting through his black hair makes him look distinguished rather than tired as he thinks, and there's still vitality in his body, in the way that he moves and the way he quirks an eyebrow up in fond exasperation at you.

But no matter how eager you are for him, to feel his sweat-slicked skin and taste him on your tongue, there's always trepidation there. And his muscles quake under your fingertips when you undo the buttons on his shirt, strip him bare before your hungry eyes, and it makes anxiety twist your stomach along with the arousal because it scares him. Your touch scares him, not because of the power you wield or your origins, but because he doesn't think he deserves it. Thinks you do it out of pity, as a bargaining chip to keep your ass from ending out on the street.

Even though you both know you aren't going anywhere, even if you didn't sleep with him.

On good days, you can push through the fear and the self-consciousness, and he comes alive underneath you, fighting for dominance, mouth hot and eager against your own. You almost always let him win, let him press you in to the sheets and do whatever he wants with you, because in this sense you are completely at his mercy, nothing but a moaning mess of nerves as he plays with your tail and thrusts inside you with a grace that you've only seen in the couplings of demons possessed by lust. And he's so painfully attentive, brushing your sweat-slicked bangs out of your eyes while he sucks painful-good bruises on your throat, fucking you back in to the headboard until you scream for him.

But sometimes, although you know he wants it, can feel it when you press down against him, but he's too lost in his own inner demons to do anything but shake and come apart at the seams, fingers lost in your hair as you kiss his chest, open mouthed and lingering where his heart thuds painfully beneath his ribs. You hold him, his back to your front, rocking leisurely between his thighs while you stroke him, chin hooked over his shoulder as you murmur sweet nothings in his ear in your native tongue, soothing but foreign and something even he can't understand. He clenches his legs together, hips twitching in aborted little movements to try and push himself more firmly through your fist before he loses his confidence. The hand not stroking his dick always finds one of his, holding tight while he arches his neck, whimpering with pleasure when he finally comes, coating your fingers and his stomach.

No matter what you do, short of taking him (because you've never dared, are too scared that it would actually shatter him), he always cries. You end up tucked tight against his chest, lips meeting over and over in short, tender embraces, completely contrary to the tears rolling down his face. And you've not confronted him about it, because it doesn't seem to be grief, doesn't seem to be regret because he doesn't let you go, keeps you close until he falls asleep, but it's so vulnerable that all you want to do is kiss the salt from his cheeks until he smiles.

And maybe someday, you'll be able to. But for now, you stroke his back, feeling each knob of his vertebrae as his breathing evens and the moisture on his face has dried, hands still holding on to yours, and each kiss brushed against his knuckles is a promise, an oath to find out what brings those tears out and to stomp it in to the dust.


	21. Sunset

The grass under your stomach is sun-warmed, plush in a way you've not really taken time to sit back and appreciate. It itches, just a little, against your stomach where your shirt rides up, but it smells fresh and clean and /alive/, especially when you pluck absentmindedly at the strands close to your face. The warm air licks at your bare feet, and your tail is twitching lazily in the scratchy carpet stretching beneath you, the last rays of the sun warming your shirt against your skin, and you inhale deeply and let the breath out in a sigh.

Eridan is stretched out next to you on his side, pillowing his head on his arm while his other hand picks at the grass much like you are, but more lazily, and his eyes are closed with his glasses hooked in the vee of his shirt's neckline. His cheeks are flushed pink, probably the lightest kiss of sunburn from all the time you'd spent outside over the course of the day, but it doesn't seem to bother him, and the smattering of color across his usually too-pale face is painfully endearing.

He's almost asleep, his breathing steady and even and shallow, so you feel a little bad when you prod him with the tip of your tail. His nose wrinkles, but when it fails to wake him, you pap his cheek with the end, and that earns you an unhappy grunt and his hand swatting the offending stimuli away. "Sol, please. Let me nap, I'm fuckin' exhausted," he groans.

You prod him again and practically roll over on top of him when he tries to turn away from you. It ends up with him half on his back, the arm that had cradled his head pinned awkwardly under his body with the weight of your upper body resting on his torso. He cracks his eyes open, and although there's indulgence there, he's also clearly more irritated than affectionate.

It _had_ been a long day.

You kiss away the crease between his eyebrows before speaking.

"Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep, old man," he yanks your tail and you pull his hair in retribution, "but if you could stop sulking for five seconds you'd see why I'm harassing you and subjecting myself to this kind of treatment."

Eridan cranes his neck, twisting at an angle that makes you ache in sympathy and you're positive is going to end up with him grinding dirt into his hair, to look at the sky behind him. The sun has just started to dip below the horizon, still sharp and painful to look at, but more orange-yellow than the colorless ball of light it usually was when you'd look at it through your slitted fingers over your eyes. Closest to it, the sky is a deep purple, the same color Eridan liked to have on everything, be it his clothes or his towels, bleeding out and reddening, turning tyrian and red and pink, shot through with wispy, pale white clouds.

Most of the time, you're either out in the grey dawn or sticky nights, holed up in the apartment around this time of the evening, when the oppressive heat of the day is fading into something more bearable, the warmth following the descending orb as it travels across the sky. You've never seen anything like this before, and it's with a touch of wonder that you watch the colors bleed and twist and shift across the sky, dying everything soft shades of cotton-candy pink.

Eridan twists enough to dislodge you from on top of him, but instead of shoving you back to your own patch of grass, he pulls your back to his chest, propping up on his elbow while his other hand rests on the dip of your waist. "I _guess_ it looks nice," he sniffs, and you kind of want to head butt him, right under his chin where you're situated, but you know that thinly veiled comments of contempt are just another way he communicates contentment, so you reign in the violent urge.

When the sun is just barely peeking over the horizon, everything black and blue and deep violet, the first hints of the stars coming to the sky, he speaks, thumb brushing against your skin from where he's pulled your shirt up just enough to touch where he wanted. "So? Coast clear?"

Although you're loathe to dislodge him, you roll squirm your way over to the edge of the little grassy knoll you've found the two of yourselves on, ignoring his noise of protest as you bump his face with your ass. The rotating red and blue lights are more visible in the dark, and you can make out a tall, slender woman with one hand on her hip, the other holding a radio to her lips as she barks orders. There's bright yellow caution tape in the not so far distance, and smack in the middle of it was the inhumanly beautiful young man and his two thralls, the ones that had tried to scalp Eridan earlier in the day when he hadn't crumbled in the face of their advances.

The woman looks up over the ridge to where you're peeking, and you can practically feel the annoyance and promise of revenge seeping out from between her red-framed glasses, and it has you wriggling back down into Eridan's arms. "Nope. Still looks ready to eat us for Sunday brunch."

Eridan grumbles, dragging his hand over his face roughly as if to wake himself a bit more before rolling onto his back and keeping you cuddled against his chest. "Pyrope is _disgustingly_ thorough, so we'll probably be here a while longer. Might as well show you some constellations now that it's dark enough."

The pictures he tries to show you in the sky don't exactly make sense, and the locations and names of the stars don't stick, but you're almost uncomfortably warm laying so close with his voice rasping in your ear, shifting every so often to trace the lines between the pinpricks of light in an attempt to make them clearer to you. He smells like lingering sunlight and soft happiness and you can't really find it in yourself to begrudge the fact that you're basically being held captive on a hill just outside the city limits by an ornery police chief.

In fact, you'd say it's the most fitting date night you've ever had.


	22. Mad

"You could have been skewered."

He's maddeningly calm as he undoes the buttons of his jacket, the blood smeared across his hairline the only thing that hints at more than an ordinary night out of the town. His fingers don't tremble as the work the buttons, as he strips off his tight-fitting gloves and tucks them in to the pockets before hanging the garment up, and he doesn't even glance up at you as he picks loose the knot of laces on his boots.

"Eridan."

Each boot comes off with a soft thud, and he hides the long laces inside as he sets them in the hall closet, the door closing with such gentleness that it makes you want to scream. You want him to slam the door, to whirl on you with fury in his eyes, but there's nothing there, usually expressive violet blank behind his glasses. You grab him when he tries to slip past, fingers tight enough to leave bruises around his bicep.

"Don't you fucking walk away from me. You almost _died_."

His gaze is so even that it makes sparks fly from your eyes. "That's kinna part of the job description," he replies with a careless shrug, and you shake him.

"You almost passed out because a blow glanced off your head," you say, gesturing at the clotted blood matting his hair. "That shouldn't have been enough to knock you down, and if I hadn't been there you'd be a decoration on that thing's toothpick. You're too fucking old for this."

Your words must have slipped past a chink in his armor, because his eyes harden and his lips curl back in a sneer. "Glad to know you think I'm some sort of feeble old man you gotta protect. Makes me feel real warm an' fuzzy on the inside."

He tries to pull away, muscles bunching under your fingers, and instead you grab him by the other arm as well, pulling him close enough that your noses are almost brushing. "Don't twist my words, you asshat. You've just been doing this for so long your body can't take it any more. It's going to get you killed, Eridan-"

"As it should!" he roars in your face, the volume making your ears ring. "There. Is. Nothing. Else. This is what I was born for, what I'm going to do until it kills me. My parents died in the field, just as their parents did before them, and their parents before that. Our only fucking purpose is to make the way a little easier for our children, but since I don't have any, I just have to make as much of a fucking dent as I can until it kills me."

It feels like a punch to the chest, because you can just imagine him, grey haired and worry-line faced, putting his gloves on and shouldering his shotgun and going out in to the cold for the last time. And that's no way to live. That's no way to _die_. And there's acid in your throat, and it looks like Eridan took a swig off the same drink because there's furious, desperate tears in his eyes, the hard line of his jaw bulging as he clenches his teeth.

"Don't try and pretend there's something noble about that," you force out through your closed-off throat. "Just because that's how it's been doesn't mean you should purposefully put yourself in harm's way to further a shitty tradition."

"What am I supposed to do if I quit? Huh? I can read languages no one else uses, and I can fight. What the fuck kind of life am I going to have if I stop? Should I just waste away on the couch trying to prolong a life that's not worth living-"

" _You aren't the only person who's affected if you die_!"

The paintings in the hallway shake with the force of your words, torn from you at an inhuman volume that was several pitches lower than your usual speaking tone. Your eyes _burn_ , but despite the power leaking out, fizzling with the sheer magnitude of your rage, he doesn't look scared. Merely shocked. And it twists the knife in your gut.

"I'm sorry she died," you rasp hoarsely, and he reels back like you just slapped him across the face. "I'm sorry you didn't get to have little demon hunting babies and go out in a blaze of glory, I really fucking am. And more than that, I'm sorry you were so fucking alone for so long. But you're not alone now. And you're not going to be."

It's taboo. You've been here for almost a year, the snow that you flew through on your way to the blazing point of protection you could feel on the horizon had faded and come back. And even now, you've never talked about it. Never talked about the fierceness with which you protect each other, the way you wrap around his body in a bed more than big enough for the two of you to not touch. You don't discuss the kisses in the kitchen, when he's sitting at his desk, when you've just finished brushing your teeth and still have flecks of minty green at the corner of your mouth. And you certainly don't talk about how long you're going to stay. Every morning he looks at you like he expected you to slip away in the night, but there you are, hogging the blankets and drooling on the pillow.

But you can't leave it alone any more. Not while he treats his life like it's not something worth protecting, like _he_ isn't something worth protecting. And it hurts soul deep, more than any of the tortures you've been exposed to in your short life, and he's starting to shake under your loosening grip on his arms. You jostle him, making his glasses slip down on his nose, exposing the raw, glossy look in his eyes.

"Don't keep doing this to yourself if you don't have to." Your voice sounds pleading, and it should be shameful, because demons don't beg. But the only thing you care about is making him understand. "I'll protect you, I always will. That won't change. But I don't want to be fucking scared of you feeling like you have to prove yourself in the most asinine ways. I won't fucking bury you. I can't."

His face crumples, lips quivering, throat working like he wants to speak but can't find the words. So you tuck him against your shoulder, his glasses being knocked askew and then falling to the floor when he shoves them completely out of the way. His bitten-down fingernails can barely be felt digging through the back of your shirt, and his face is damp and hot against your neck as he starts to shake. You can feel his lips move, brushing against your skin, but you don't want to hear what he has to say.

Because you know. You know that he's sorry, that he doesn't want to hurt you, that he wants to quit and find something else to do with himself. But it's literally all he knows, has spent his entire life fitting into the mold of good son and husband and fucking demon slayer, and he doesn't know how to break out. You're too little too late, and you can't offer him an ultimatum, know that you would lose, and you fucking hate him for it because you're going to sit in this apartment and watch him keep wasting away to nothing.

But you're a demon. And you're shit at being told that you can't have something; it only makes you want it more. So you tilt his head back, cover his lips with your own, taste the tears on his tongue, and resolve to do everything within your power to change his mind.


	23. Thousand

You wake up when your window explodes.

All the entrances and exits out of your apartment are warded, sealed tight. But with Sollux around, floating in and out of the windows as he pleases, knowing that he's more than capable of reacting to a threat if he needed to, you've gotten lazy about sealing them back up when he comes home. The bedroom window is covered with blackout drapes, is high enough up (and few enough demons can actually fly), that it's usually not the one you're concerned about.

Turns out that was a brilliant fucking move.

Something is writhing on the bed, tangled in the covers, grinding broken glass into your leg, and the handgun in your nightstand suddenly feels like miles away as opposed to a comfortable and safe distance. Any second, you're expecting claws in your stomach or fangs ripping at your throat, because even when startled awake, red and blue spitting fire in the darkness, it's going to take a precious handful of seconds before Sollux gets his bearings, and you could be wearing your insides as a necklace by the time that happens.

But when your fingers close around cold metal, you realize that there's nothing scrabbling for you, that the glass shards sticking in your skin is the only harm to come to you. In fact, you'd be willing to bet that they don't even realize you're there, and an errant kick sends you off the edge of the bed almost as if to confirm that train of thought. You take the advantage, despite how confusion is practically blinding you, to fumble your glasses on in an attempt to see anything beside the lights show casting your bedroom in bizarre, twisting shadows.

It's hard to see, even with the fire from Sollux's powers blazing, but you can see two distinct forms, both of about the same side, trying to get the other pinned, grappling for the advantage. There are two tails, two sets of horns, two pairs of eyes flaring red and blue as the mattress is utterly and completely shredded in their attempts to claw one another's face off. It hits you like a fully loaded semi that even if you could get a clear shot, you don't know which one is Sollux.

Flesh splits, the sound of claws raking over bones and shredding muscle cutting through the darkness, and it has the bodies swinging around. Without the struggle, you can make out wild, fluffed hair and gnarled horns, the demon cooing almost like a pleased mother as his fingers twist, making Sollux _howl_. You shoot the fucker in the side just seconds before Sollux throws him into the wardrobe with enough force that the whole thing just gives.

You expect it not to get up, and it doesn't. What you didn't expect was the laughter. This horrible, hysterical giggle, hitching with pained gasps and gurgling with blood in it's mouth. The sound makes your stomach twist alarmingly, and it's not your first time going toe to toe with a demon out of it's goddamn mind, but you've broken out in a cold sweat, the gun slipping in your grasp, and you're shaking in a way that doesn't have anything to do with the cold wind blowing through the shattered window.

It sounds too familiar.

Sollux is on the other demon, one hand around it's throat, the other a useless bloody mess hanging at it's side, but he doesn't kill it, just sits on it's stomach, energy pulsing from his eyes like the threat hasn't been neutralized, like the thing's spine hadn't turned to jelly from the impact. You scrabble madly for the light switch, flooding the room and lessening the wild shadows and muddied colors that Sollux's powers cast.

You finally fumble the gun and can't really find it in yourself to be embarrassed by the lack of professionalism.

The creature Sollux has pinned is still laughing, the sound starting to choke off as Sollux leans his weight against the other demon's throat, cutting it into something more like a hysterical gurgle. Thin, almost skeletal, the demon doesn't look like anything intimidating, especially with his skin drawn so tight over his bones that it looks like it was made three sizes too small. You can see now that it's tail is a mangled mess, like someone caught it in the lawnmower, and the ram's horns on it's head are gnarled, curling back into his head like they didn't quite manage to separate into the elegant loops that Sollux's are.

His mouth, and there's little doubt now that the demon is a he, is too big for his face, and when Sollux jostles him, the thick bangs covering his eyes flop back. The red and blue orbs are the same, crackle with the same power, but there are spiderwebs of black distorting the energy there, making it flash erratically, and one of his eyes won't open all the way, the other widened painfully as if to make up for it. You can't see Sollux's face, but his tail is rigid, and you'd compare it to a startled cat if you weren't about to start losing your shit like this was your first mission.

"How did you find me?" Sollux growls, voice pitched so low that you're surprised that it even registers to you, and not for the first time, you're glad that you're protecting him, not fighting him.

The other demon's bloody lips curl in a grin so broad it makes your cheeks ache just to look at. "It's easy to find yourself," the demon lisps between broken teeth, and Sollux hits him so hard the lights in his eyes flicker out entirely.

"Does she know where I am? How much did you tell her?"

Jerky, aborted head shakes have Sollux squeezing the other demon's neck so tight you don't know how his windpipe hasn't just collapsed, and without any air in his lungs it should be impossible to _keep giggling_. "She's always known," he whispers, and it sounds like a caress, like a promise. Sollux jerks like he's been electrocuted.

There's an agonizing moment where Sollux doesn't speak, doesn't move, and the demon beneath him is tittering in increasingly hysterical, pained tones. Carefully, he releases his neck, and when the other demon doesn't move, he says something, complex and ancient and heavy that makes your ears tingle just to hear. The laughter tapers off, but you can still see that ghastly smile on his lips even as a tear slips from his too-wide eye and slips back into his scraggly hair. A single word answers Sollux's question, and you barely turn around before you hear Sollux's claws pierce his neck, a horrible ripping, squelching sound accompanying the movement and you can taste acid in the back of your mouth.

"What."

You can't even form a proper question, because there's about a thousand struggling to get out at the same time. As you pick up your gun, you hear the damp splat of something being discarded on the floor, and you find yourself wondering if it's time to start apartment hunting since you are never sleeping in here again. Because it's so fucking obvious what that was, what just got literally thrown through your window and into your lap.

"She's been working on them since she found me," Sollux answers, and although he's moved away from the body, he hasn't looked away from the dead eyes and the horns that are a crude mimic of his own. "She kept me close, didn't let me wonder alone, so I didn't understand what was so special about me. I just know she was always drawing blood, cutting shit off and feeding it to the pits to see what got spit back out."

All the uneven patches of skin that you'd laid your lips against, that you'd written off as some unique demon characteristic, suddenly make sense, and while ordinarily you'd be scrabbling for your laptop to take notes, to record any sort of new insight being offered to him, all you want to do is sit down and cry. You must have made a noise, whimpered, gagged, something, because he looks over his shoulder at you, so closed off that you're terrified of how _foreign_ he looks for the first time, a year too late.

"All I knew was that she wanted more of me, an elite task force or a fucking army or I don't even know what. But the pits aren't made to take things, just throw things out, let them crawl and writhe around in the sulfur until they decide whether they're going to roll back in and die or move forward." His attention turns back to the crumpled form on the splintered wood. "When I was there, none of them even looked like me. The pits just kept spitting back out these nasty, wiggling lumps of skin with no eyes or legs or mouths or anything distinguishing it as alive or…or anything really. I guess when I escaped, she started putting more work into figuring out why nothing was spawning like it was supposed to."

You already know. You ask anyways. "Who _is_ she?"

"One of the princes."

The sharp pain of sitting down so suddenly barely registers in your brain. Sollux has his attention on you now, and he looks fucking exhausted, spattered in his own blood and his…his clone, his brother, his fucking _something_ 's blood on top of that, and so resigned it makes everything once lying in a jumble in your brain pop into place.

"It wasn't her out there, when you showed up. If she's a prince, she can't leave; the whole fucking system would start to collapse if her aura wasn't there. That…that was a just a _thrall_?" He doesn't meet your eyes, and although you've never been afraid to face your own death, the sheer knowledge that literally any second you could have been struck down by a power that would shred through your wards and spells and runes like they were wet paper, seeping that black presence into your head until it drowned you, makes you feel lightheaded.

That's why he never told you. Never talked about it. Because as fucked up as the ownership, the attempts to coerce the pits into spawning copies of what you recognize to be a very rare and desirable power among demons, the psychological hell of what it must have been like to live under that kind of madness, that kind of power, Sollux wouldn't have shied away from talking about that. But hiding the toy soldier of one of the ancients, not just thousands of years old, but hundreds of thousands years old, powerful beyond all belief, is something worth hiding.

You would have made him leave if you'd known.

You should still make him leave.

He smells fucking disgusting, skin tacky with drying blood and sweat, and there's still a body laying not even five feet from him, but you still pull him close, trembling sharp edges and injured arm and all, because apparently your lack of self preservation has decayed to the point where you can't even think about throwing him out. More than once, he's looked your issues and literal demons in the eye and dared them to do their worst. He's stood through the nightmares and sickness and arguments and nights spent chasing monsters through the mud, all without wavering. So maybe his issue is bigger than all yours put together, but you're already in over your head, have made it this far, and you don't think you can live without him any more.

"Well, I do want to go out "in a blaze of glory", as you so aptly put it."

His uninjured arm wraps around your middle, and when he laughs, it doesn't sound manic or hysterical, just accepting and weary and soul-deep sad.


	24. Outside

There are certain advantages to being a demon. While you're shorter than Eridan, you're more resilient, heal faster, don't get sick, don't really age, have kickass psychic powers, and can fly. All of these are obvious advantages over being a human, but some of them are more subtle. Like having a constant body temperature that isn't effected by the outside temperature. You think it may be something as dumb as hellfire, something in your most basic programming, that keeps you hot to the touch and comfortable that way be it in the middle of the Sahara or the deep tundras of the Arctic.

You get the feeling that this is a more obvious advantage right now than usual, because Eridan's knuckles are bright red and he keeps sniffling in an attempt to not have to wipe his nose that isn't really working.

"You're going to die. I didn't think there was a stupider way to die than the ones we've already established, but congratulations. I'm officially impressed."

Heaving a sigh that puffs enough smokey white vapor to cloud his glasses, he flicks the brown canvas he'd just finished tying to the pole and sits back on his haunches, clearly pleased. "Have a little more faith in me than that. I've been living here my whole life, I can handle the cold, and you don't even get cold. So shut up and help me carry the stuff out of the jeep."

The jeep belongs to Rose's wife, Kanaya. So does the tent, the overlarge bright orange sleeping bag, the gas powered space heater, the hilariously undersized cooler (which is actually perfect since this expedition started only a handful of hours ago on a whim, and the two of you are planning on packing up again when you wake up). All of it is dumped inside the brown monstrosity, which is just the right height for you but makes Eridan have to duck as he unrolls the sleeping bag and spreads the armful of additional blankets on top of it. You're sitting just inside the zippered opening, holding the lantern and sincerely hoping the blue tint to his lips is just your imagination.

"I didn't think Rose was the kind of person to go camping," you say as Eridan places the space heater at the end of the sleeping bag, far enough away that it won't get kicked but close enough that the warmth can be felt even while it's cranking up to full capacity.

"She goes under duress." He nuzzles against your warm cheek when he leans over to zip the tent shut, and your internal temperature spikes in answer to how cold he feels against you. "Kan's family was big into the whole wilderness adventure bullshit, and when she feels homesick, she mopes around the house looking pitiful for about a week before Rose caves and they pack up and go to the Grand Canyon or the bottom of the Mariana Trench or wherever the hell they end up. I almost feel bad for askin' to borrow the stuff, this is a guarantee that they'll be packed up and on the road like five days after we get back."

"Your houses are so comfortable, I don't know why you want to come out here and sleep in the woods. Not that I've never roughed it before, living Down There makes this look like the Ritz, but I don't know why people would come out here and freeze their asses off when they don't have to."

Flopping down on the sleeping bag, Eridan kicks off his boots with a relieved sigh despite almost losing his double layer of socks in the process. "Most people don't go camping when it's this cold. It's more of a warm weather activity."

"But not for you," you intone, toeing off your own shoes in order to slide your legs under the thick blanket-sleeping bag nest set up in the center of the tent. You may not be able to feel the cold, but it's pressing on your skin in a way that's almost becoming uncomfortable, and the weight of the blankets helps chase that way. "Because you're crazy."

"Because I'm crazy."

He makes a shooing motion, and you scrunch further down into the sleeping bag, propping yourself up against the weird built-in pillow thing as he turns off the lantern. The tent is almost completely pitch black, and you're convinced he's going to fall and break his nose or your leg in the process, but instead of stumbling towards where you're laying, he starts to unzip the roof.

You start to protest, because he honestly will get pneumonia and die if they're open to the elements when the morning frost settles, but as the moonlight starts to peek through the material, you can see that he's not opening the tent to the elements, but rather removing a layer of canvas that had previously blocked the clear plastic that made up the top of the curved dome. Tossing the wadded up material to the corner of the tent (which will probably get him bitched at by Kanaya or Rose or both), he slips into the sleeping bag next to you, still wearing his jeans and thick flannel lumberjack shirt and glasses.

If you thought the stars were pretty during the muggy night you spent trapped on the grassy knoll last summer, they were breathtaking in the cold air of the winter. Every pinprick of light shone like fire, managing somehow to still stand out despite the milky cream swirl you can make out more clearly this far from the city. Some of the stars you think you remember from his lazy constellation lesson, but there are just so many more out here, seemingly appearing out of nowhere despite knowing that they just weren't visible because of the city lights. Sure, you've seen pictures of the Milky Way and the deepest recesses of the cosmos that human technology can access, but this tiny chunk of sky, slightly warped by the plastic, is more beautiful than any of the high-resolution images on your computer screen.

Eridan is starting to warm up quickly, between your abnormally high body temperature and the gently humming space heater. You unbutton his shirt enough to slip your hand inside to rest against his stomach, curled against his side with your head tilted just so to avoid pressing your horns into his chest uncomfortably. Without your meaning to, your tail has wrapped around his wrist, holding loosely while he traces absentmindedly up and down your spine.

"This is better, yeah?" he says, and his breath still puffs out like a dragon's.

The past week has seen the two of you becoming increasingly more miserable. Neither of you have gone back in the bedroom since disposing of your double's corpse and haphazardly patching up the broken window and sealing it, and although it's been thrown out, the mattress hasn't been replaced. You're not sure what the hesitation means, but it has the two of you sleeping on the couch when you can sleep at all. You're mopey. He broods. You poke and prod at each other like you're waiting for someone to snap.

And when he does, it's not how you'd expected.

You'd expected to end up on your ass in the cold, or worse, simply done away with. But although he seems more than a little fed up when he drags you to Rose's, the tension starts to ease as soon as the two of you are in the jeep, driving through the trees as the sun casts long shadows through the cabin of the car and stretching on until it blends in with the darkness of another figure. And it eased the tension in you too, like being in the place you'd called home for the past year had suddenly become too much, become too tainted with what had transpired and what had come to light.

"Yeah," you agree, brushing your thumb against his belly button in a way that makes him squirm and grumble unhappily. Part of you expects him to pick back up where he left off the last time you were stargazing, narrating the mythology and the cultures associated with the constellation, the origin of the names, the scientific context of the whole thing. And while you wouldn't be necessarily opposed to that, he instead remains silent, legs twining with yours as he rubs the base of your tail in a way that makes you rumble contentedly against his chest (which is most certainly not a purr or anything resembling one).

It takes a long while for either of you to fall asleep, but it's so comfortable in the tent and against his body that you drift under the watchful eye of the sky in a kind of pleased haze, muzzy and drowsy and so warm. You barely even notice when you finally slip under, dreaming for the first time in days, not of twisted flesh and eerily similar eyes and crazed laughter, but of milk swirling in the dark canvas of the sky and safety and familiar hands under your clothes, anchoring you to this plane of existence you've come to identify as your own.


	25. Winter

You don't like to think of yourself as becoming domestic, but there's a certain intimacy in routine that you find yourself enjoying more than a demon probably ought to. The difference in temperatures between winter and summer are something that you feel, but remain removed from; you're aware of the heat or absence of heat, of the cold snow against the back of your neck or the muggy moistness of the summer air, but it doesn't penetrate your constant body temperature to make you uncomfortable. Eridan's visceral hate of the heat and passive, accepting disdain for the cold make you grateful that it is indeed something you don't have to experience for yourself.

But as you fall into your second winter together, your post-mission evenings start to follow a certain pattern. This is the harshest winter the city has weathered in a long time, and when you finally stumble in at the wee hours of the morning, Eridan's teeth are clenched to keep them from chattering and his fingers are stiff and gnarled with the cold despite his gloves. You toe off your (usually snow soaked) shoes to float to the bathroom, wanting to give the ancient pipes and low quality water heater a minute or two head start while Eridan strips off his layers in the foyer.

He always dawdles, because taking off his peacoat, the extra liner he purchased for it, exposes him to the cold air lingering at his back from when the two of you rushed in the door. You know he could dress warmer, but anything more than this and he would start losing his range of movement; being cold sucks, but being dead sucks more. So by the time he's shucked his boots and gloves and scarf and coat, the bathroom is thick and hazy with warmth and steam. You never turn the fan on, it would kind of defeat the purpose, so the air feels thick and syrupy like it does in July.

He has more layers to remove when he finally comes to the bathroom, his thick sweater and jeans giving way to the form-fitting black leggings and undershirt that supposedly help keep any escaping heat close to his body. (Even if it was a load of malarky, you wouldn't protest, because the way the slick looking material hugs his muscles and the curve of his waist, the vulnerable lines of his ribs, is too nice to pass up.) Stripped bare, glasses sitting on the back of the toilet, he sinks into the water with this hiss of half pleasure half pain that always makes your spine tingle.

It's always painfully hot at first, his pale skin reddening quickly at the temperature, but the discomfort bleeds away, taking the tension from the cold and the strain from the day away with it until he's boneless against the warm porcelain of the tub. It's not as big as you both wish it was, but there's enough from for you to strip off your clothes and join him, settling between his raised knees that peek out of the water like knobby spires, his chest chilly but quickly warmed by your own heat.

You almost never speak, and the silence isn't an uncomfortable one. It's just understood that this is how the two of you wind down, come back from the violent and often animalistic place you find yourself in after racing through the trees, crawling up fire escapes, trying to keep each other from getting gutted. Sometimes he plays with your tail, winding it around his fingers and brushing his thumb against the tip. Sometimes he touches you, slow and lazy and with such profound affection in each motion, in his lips against the nape of your neck and the twist of his hand, that you come apart trembling and completely overwhelmed in his arms.

But most of the time you just lounge, breathing in the warm smell of his skin while he thumbs absently at your hipbones. You're never in there for long, because as soon as the heat loses it's edge, can no longer boil him like a lobster, he wants to get dressed in his ridiculously thick, ridiculously fuzzy pajama pants and at least two sweaters to go hide in the nest of blankets on the couch that still serves as your temporary bed. And without being asked, you'll go to the kitchen and brew a pot of coffee, preparing a large mug with two spoons of sugar and a liberal splash of hazelnut creamer for him to cradle close to his bony chest and breathe in happily while you queue up whatever it is you're in the process of watching on Netflix. He doesn't really care about what's on, just presses against your side and sips his coffee while his eyelids droop and he's almost always asleep by the time he hits the bottom, the empty mug resting against your thigh as he dozes on your shoulder.

Domestic is exactly what it is, and it should make you grimace, flick your tail behind you in agitation as you move the mug to the table, stretching him out so you can spoon up behind him, the television still in sight while you rest your hand against the curve of his hip under his stupid frumpy sweaters. You can't find it in you to begrudge the way the whole process just makes you feel warm and content. Call it what you will, but these little routines, these moments of simplicity against what is a truly absurd lifestyle, are what set your heart at ease more than anything else.


	26. Diamond

Terezi Pyrope is Not Impressed by you.

Demons have a sort of stigma attached to them. A lot of your kin are terrifying, horrible to look at, can make your skin crawl just by getting close enough to you. So although you're small and not very physically intimidating, you're strange, non-human, and the flying and the horns and the glowing eyes should at least make people weary and at the least respectful. But all Terezi does when you stop shielding yourself on the couch ("I may not be able to see you, chief, but I know you're there, and if you're going to stick your nose in my business I'd like you to not be a dick about it.") is shake her head and fix Eridan with a look that's a cross between impressed and _done_.

You end up in his office, Terezi sitting backwards in one of the spare chairs while Eridan sits at his desk, flipping through the folder she'd thrown down on the polished wood. Floating just behind his office chair, you're torn between perusing the file along with him and studying the woman inspecting her long nails, feigning patience while your lover reads. You hadn't gotten a good look at her during your brief but entirely too long encounter last summer, but it's obvious now that she's the person whose rules Eridan has to play by. There's an intensity about her, a kind of casual commanding presence that you bet she can sharpen and direct to knock whoever dares cross her right off their feet.

She meets your eyes, and instead of sneering at your perusing glances, she just holds your gaze, and like hell you're going to be the first person to look away.

"Are you fucking serious with this?" Eridan says, and you snap your attention to the card in his hand, a heavy, formal looking thing with loopy calligraphy writing and the scent of lilies clinging to the paper.

Terezi is smirking, because clearly directing your attention elsewhere means she won. "Deadly fucking serious."

It's a calling card. At least, you think that's the right term for it. The location and the item doesn't mean anything to you besides knowing that something worth a lot of money is about to go missing, but it's a declaration of intent, a hint to the police as to where the wily thief is going to be and when. "Did we fall into an anime or something when I wasn't looking?" Eridan and Terezi's eyebrows go up at the same time, and it would be hilarious if they weren't directing it at you. "Netflix."

Thankfully, your lover doesn't press (or tease, or ridicule) and just turns the card over in his hands before putting it back in the folder. "As…bizarre as this is, what's it got to do with me?"

Terezi looks unimpressed. "I'm insulted that you actually believe that I think you're that dumb. I may not understand the implications of it in the real world, but I got the fucking reference. I know you don't like working with me, but tough shit."

You pick up the card yourself, and the only thing that strikes you as strange is the word at the bottom in place of a name. Legion.

Eridan taps his fingers on the desk, the line of his jaw tense as he stalls. It's obvious to the both of you that he knows what's going on, and it's killing him not to just throw it in your faces. "It means multiple possessions," he sighs eventually, and the woman across the room looks positively gleeful. "Two or more non-corporeal demons taking over one human in order to accomplish a shared goal. Hardly a fuckin' legion, but it was hilariously obvious, so I'm not gonna complain. Because of how showy it is, and the actions behind the note, I'd venture a guess that there's a pride and a greed personality shacking up together."

"Great!" Terezi says, clapping her hands together once. "You'll help?"

Eridan fixes her with the withering look he usually reserves for when you track snow in the house or take the last slice of cake. "Not like I can say no at this point."

"What are we going to have to do?" you ask, and oddly enough this makes the police chief cackle.

"Oh, no no no. My task force may be used to working with Mister Ampora when we have to, but you're sure as hell not coming to the scene with us. If it's not a person, they shoot it. And you're pretty clearly not a person."

You sneer. "Maybe they could just _not do that_."

Terezi just smiles back, placid and calm and polite as can be. "Doesn't quite work like that, lambchop."

Throwing the letter opener between her eyes is starting to look real damn appealing when Eridan speaks up. "She's right. Since the letter got sent to the station, Terezi has to take care of it and can't just let us handle things under the table. People ain't gonna be cool with you, and while I ordinarily would tell them to take a long walk off a short pier, I don't need that shit when I'm tryin' to work."

Several things are rolling around in your head. The first of which is fact that you've been on earth, with Eridan, for over a year now, and never once has he left you behind. And never once have you stayed behind of your own free will. Even when you're tired or grumpy or pissed off at him about something, you're still there, slogging through the rain and blood and snow and mud because that's just how it works. It's always been that way, from when he drug you along because he didn't trust you alone in the apartment to how he now views you as an ally, a valuable asset, and you follow of your own free will.

The second is that you can't protect him if you're stuck in the apartment.

"I can cloak myself," you point out, probably needlessly, since both of the humans sitting in the room saw proof of that not twenty minutes ago. "If the issue is me being seen, then I won't be seen."

"But that means you can't fight, either," Terezi points out, resting her bony chin in her hand. "You really want to tell me that you can hang there, out of sight, and watch your boyfriend get the shit kicked out of him? Hypothetically, that is," she adds when Eridan opens his mouth to protest.

"If your people are so useless that he needs backup and they can't provide it, then I'm even more convinced that I need to fucking be there if something does go that wrong."

"Okay, the two of you need to stop talking about me like I'm thoroughly incapable of working on my own," Eridan cuts in testily, and oh, he's _pissed_. His eyes are narrowed, voice sharp and positively frigid. You really ought to shut up.

"But you kind of are," and wow, that wasn't what you meant to say _at all_ , and Eridan's face is pinched and you're pretty sure Terezi's jaw dropped (further encouraging the idea that this has turned into some sort of bad cartoon). "I mean, not that you can't take care of yourself normally, but the more entities contained within a person, the more powerful they're going to be, and if they're so arrogant that they're leaving hints in plain sight, then I'm gonna venture a guess and say that they're more than you can handle on your own."

His face is red, and you don't think you've ever seen him this furious. "I think you need to get out of my office."

And you didn't mean to wound his pride, to tear him down in front of Terezi. But the hard truth is the fact that if you hadn't accompanied him on his missions over the past month, he'd have died. During all of them. And you don't view him as weak for it, but he's started slipping, started losing his agility and strength (but not his aim or steady hands, and that's the only other fucking thing keeping him alive at this point). If you stay here, leave his life in the protection of a group of humans, you're never going to get him back. He'll get ripped apart, and you can't protect him if you _aren't there_.

"Stop being so fucking stubborn and listen to what I'm saying. I'm a demon, I know at least a little about the situation-"

But he's already toned you out. Under the anger, you can see how hurt he is at the thought that you think he's some feeble creature that needs your protection. And it makes you want to tear your hair out, scream at him, because that's not it _at all_. "No, I heard you loud and clear. But you're not changin' my mind, or Terezi's, so unless you can calm down, you need to leave."

Even when you're frothing mad at him, the way he just locks up, shuts down instead of fighting back makes you sick. Because you get the vibe from him that it used to be like that, that he used to be full of righteous anger, furious energy, let it roll off him in waves while he yelled and spit and fought. But he doesn't even want to convince you. He's just tired. Always so fucking tired.

"Fine." You hiss, and there's sparks coming off your eyes but even with the blatant display of power, Eridan just looks sad, wilted, and you want to hit him for making you feel guilty about wanting to protect him, keep him safe. "You know what? That's fine. Go out there and get your head torn off because you're too goddamn proud to accept help. I don't care. I don't give half a fuck about what happens to you."

And even as the words pour out of your mouth, you know they're the wrong thing to say. But you don't care. In this instance, you despise him so much you can't see past your own rage to take in his glassy eyes and the anguish writhing there. You don't _want_ to see it. So you storm out of the office, slamming the door behind you so hard the wood splinters. But you can't even leave the apartment, because all the wards are still up, so instead you pull all the blankets off the couch on top of you so you can lie on the floor and stew and sulk like you're fresh out of the pits.

Fuck him. _Fuck_ him.

And fuck you for giving a shit in the first place.

You can hear him putting his coat on and the scrape of the butt of his shotgun as he leans it against the wall so he can tie his boots. You can hear Terezi slip out, the door closing softly behind her, and there's a moment of silence. Like he wants to say something, and you can imagine him standing there, wrapped up in all his layers, gun in hand, and not a hint that anything might be wrong aside from the red skin around his eyes.

"I'll talk to you when I come back," he says, softly, tentatively, and you don't answer.

You wish you had.

Because he never does.


	27. Letters

_~~Eridan,~~ _

__

__

_~~I'm s~~ _

_Wow, this looks fucking terrible. I told Kanaya not to give me her fancy ass stationary and the matching pen, but like she ever listens to me. I looked around the apartment but couldn't find any pencils, which sucks because it's taking me ten minutes to try and decide what to say because I know I can't erase it. I guess now that I think of it, you never really used pencils; probably didn't think they were elegant enough for something. But even being careful with what I'm saying, I'm still crossing half of this bullshit out. I was never the most ~~wordy~~ eloquent individual, but Kanaya said that it might make me feel better if I just kind of ~~word vomited~~ WORD VOMITED all my feelings onto a stupid piece of paper. Which is going to be hard if she doesn't stop PUTTING HER TWO CENTS WORTH IN._

_I'm just ~~sorry~~ not sure where to even start since anything I can think of to say is going to be grossly inadequate._

_I wish I'd been there. That's probably not what you'd want to hear, but fucking deal with. I wish I'd ignored you and gone anyways and had all those trigger-happy policemen pissing their pants because then at least you'd still be here. And I'd really rather have you pissed off and alive. And I'm not just saying that because you don't usually stay mad at me for long. Even if you never spoke to me again, that'd be okay._

_I didn't mean any of the shit I said. I just got ~~scared~~ ~~so fucking scared~~_

_That shouldn't have been the last thing I said to you. It sounds overdramatic and angsty and like something out of a bad novel, but there was so much I never got to put into words. Whenever I tried it just got caught in my throat and I got frustrated with myself so I'd just lash out and end up hurting you, and at that point what's the fucking use? Why try when I know I'm just going to fuck it up?_

_I wasn't trying to call you weak. Whenever we fought about this, it was always like you had something to prove. Which is fucking stupid. I'm a demon. I'm immortal. You trying to prove yourself against me was moronic from the start, would have been stupid even when you were young and at the top of your game. I'm already impressed. You didn't have to try so hard._

_It's probably selfish. But I just wanted to make you happy. I thought maybe if we went somewhere away from the city, out in the country or in the woods somewhere, we'd be happy all the time like when we could manage to get a couple of days without having to shoot some fucker's head off. That's probably naive of me too. Hilarious, a naive demon, who'd have thunk it._

_I don't really care if we're out bettering the world through our combined badass skills or if I'm fetching books for you so you can play Rose for the younger hunters or whatever the hell it takes you to feel useless but fucking safe._

_I wanted so much but I could never tell you_

_I'm so fucking sorry Eridan_

_I'm sorry_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The books are a familiar weight in your hands, but it feels wrong to pull them from their designated spots on the shelf and tuck them where they can fit in the boxes scattered on the floor. You'd saved the office for last, because there were too many memories here, wrapped up in the smell of old paper, ink, and antique wood. It smells like him in here more than it does anywhere else in the house, and the ache might have been a sweet one, but the way you'd yelled at him the last time you set foot in the office made the memories curdle and taste sour.

Kanaya is working in silence across the room, removing thick files with Eridan's near-illegible scrawl labeling the tabs and setting them in the plastic filing bins she'd brought for this express purpose. The two of you had become comfortable with each other in the past several days, sorting out the furniture and the clothes and the knick-knacks you couldn't touch because almost all of them were enchanted in some way. The lease was up, none of you had access to his funds, and you had to find somewhere to go. All the belongings would be stashed in the Lalonde's garage, most of the furniture would have to be sold.

The wards still flicker, sometimes cutting out entirely, and it makes your already frozen blood ice to feel that absence of power and the dark tendrils that reach for you as soon as it so much as quivers.

A soft chirping cuts through the silence, and you're glad that Kanaya kept her phone volume turned down, or else you'd have hit the roof like a frightened cat. She exchanges a few words in that foreign, rough yet beautiful language that she talks to Rose in when she doesn't want you to hear what they have to say. But instead of hanging up, she holds the phone out to you.

There's a moment of white noise silence where you're straining to hear anything at all, and then fabric rustles, someone's breathing cuts in, and it sounds pained, labored, and your stomach fills with lead. They try to speak, raspy and incoherent, and you're already crying before you can make out his words, sharp and forced, his voice so achingly familiar even when it's rough with disuse, and you're on your knees on the decorative rug before he speaks the two words you've been waiting so long to hear.

"I quit."


	28. Promise

The house is small.

Hardly bigger than the apartment, you'd contemplated looking for a slightly larger place, but what would you need the space for? As much as you drive each other crazy when you're in each other's space for too long, you'd get anxious if you didn't know where he was, couldn't feel the flicker of his energy against the base of your skull. And the house you find yourself in fits the bill perfectly; he has an office, you have the dizzying stretch of the fields all around the structure, and the kitchen and bathroom and bedroom and living room makes up the space in between where, more often than not, you're together.

Everything about it is brighter than the apartment, and while you know it's because of all the windows, floor to ceiling in the kitchen and on every wall throughout the rest of the house, it feels like more than just a literal presence of light. The paint is slightly faded, some of your furniture clashes with the white-washed wood and deep oak floors, but the smell of his books and your shoes sitting in the entryway makes the whole house feel bright, lived in, more your own than the apartment ever had.

When you first moved in, he hadn't been able to do much at all. The doctors hadn't wanted to release him period, let alone this early, but he'd made his choice. His life was on a timer now, and leaving the constant supervision of the doctors cut that time in half, but you understand. He doesn't want to die in a cold white room, out of his mind on drugs and alone save for his caretakers; he wanted to be home, with you, in his own bed, still himself, on his own terms.

You love him so fiercely for it.

So at first, he spends a lot of time on the couch, dozing with the sun warm on his face or flicking through the books Rose sends to him. Sometimes he just lays there with the afghan pulled halfway up his chest, watching through the big picture window as you flit around in the front yard. You weren't sick, didn't have to recover, and you got bored quickly even with how often you came back in to check on him. There's only so much television to watch, so many books to read, before you start going stir crazy. It's in your nature; you're a creature of action, and while you don't miss the hectic lifestyle, the blood on your hands and the adrenaline coursing through your system, you do find yourself getting restless enough to be miserable.

So you do what any other demon with acres of land and boatloads of free time would do. You start a garden.

The sun pouring through the thin gauze curtains isn't enough to wake you up any more. Warmth floods the room, and you've not had to run the air conditioner or the heater since moving in, and you hadn't realized just how artificial it made everything taste. If anything, the soft light and gradual heat wakes you up more pleasantly than anything else, and since neither of you are on a schedule, you can appreciate the drowsiness, the lazy way you kiss him awake until he sighs soft and content and shoves you out of bed to bring him coffee.

But there's none of that this morning, because he's pulling back the covers and prodding you awake, smelling like dew and damp soil. Now that he can, has finally gotten his strength back, he spends even more time outside than you do. (He rigged up a swing from one of the trees on the edge of the property, and you'd tease him about it if it weren't so adorable, weren't so obvious that this is the urban boy's first foray out into the country.) Usually, you encourage it, are right out there with him, but you'd gotten accustom to waking up gradually, and his fingers digging into your arm makes you grumble and try and snatch the blankets back.

"Sol, c'mon, get up. It's already past breakfast, you can't sleep forever."

He's wearing a loose fitting shirt and soft worn jeans, bare feet leaving just the barest smudge of earth on the sheets when he follows you when you roll over. "I absolutely, literally can. There is nothing stopping me. I don't have to get up."

" _Sol_."

And there's that affectionate, petulant whining you'd been waiting for. You flop an arm out, snag a handful of his hair, and drag him close enough to taste the honey he'd eaten on his biscuits before coming to drag you out of bed. But even that's too slow, because he's manhandling you out of the house without even giving you a chance to change out of your pajamas, around to the plot of land behind the house that you'd tilled and fertilized and planted in. Right on the edge, as you get closer, you can see little sprouts of green peeking out from the dark earth, just barely reaching up towards the sky.

"Your peas, right?" you ask, scrubbing a hand down your face as you bend closer, feeling the waxy texture of the green leaves against your fingers. "It's about time they sprouted."

He looks awestruck, childlike in his wonder, as he looks at the life he can see forming there, because of his tentative and often clumsy care. And it's incredible, how much younger, how much healthier, he looks with his toes curling in the grass and his cheeks pink with lingering sunburn. And even with as heavy handed as you can be with each other, you can't even begin to tease him for being so excited over a sprouting plant. Because the significance is so heavy in the slight chill of the morning air.

Eridan Ampora, demon slayer extroidanare, who's taken hundreds of lives, has created something instead of destroying it.

You lean against him, the dew soaking the hems of your pajama bottoms, and he nestles against your side like a cat against a space heater. The warmth in your chest is stifling, threatening to choke you, and the only way to dissipate it is to kiss him again, and this time he doesn't push you away, just shifts closer, fingers slipping in your hair to curl near your horns. He's smiling when you release his lips, foreheads resting together, your breath warm against his skin when you speak.

"Do you even like peas?"

You totally deserved it, so you don't begrudge him when he shoves you over and you get a mouth full of dirt because you're already laughing. Besides, he'll be tasting it when you kiss him in the kitchen after you go inside.

(He doesn't even complain. Much.)


	29. Simple

Summer in the country is very different from in the city.

It's still hot as hell. Probably even more so, without any trees for shade save for the clusters at the edge of your property, leaving the sun to shine unhindered and cook everything like a state of the art oven. Even with your constant body temperature, you're uncomfortably warm if you set foot outside the house, the air-conditioning leaking out through the door when you open it to fool you into thinking it's not as soul crushingly hot as it really is.

But the air is easier to breathe. It doesn't snake into your lungs like a wet blanket and leave your skin tacky to the touch, and there's almost always a breeze rustling through the trees and sweeping over the level field of your plot of land, making the wind chimes on the front porch tinkle softly in a way that you've come to associate with stifling heat and the cool kiss of the breeze offsetting the unpleasantness. The air even smells better, lacking the pollutant undertone that becomes more pronounced in the summer, instead carrying the scent of dry grass and ripening strawberries.

Today, the wind also brings the scent of damp cloth and lavender.

The grass is crunchy under your bare feet, not dead but damn close, and the scene just outside the shadow of the house isn't as alluring as they make it out to be in the movies. It's not miles of billowing white strung up between the strange tree-like metal contraptions; it's the familiar periwinkle blue of your bedsheets and his work-worn button downs and stained gardening jeans and a handful of towels fluttering in the breeze. It's less artificial this way, because neither of you own anything that's just plain white linen, and his underwear seems to barely be hanging on by the clothespins he's unclipping from the hem of his shirt.

You duck under the still-damp, clean smelling fitted sheet to where he's started hanging up the dish towels, his fingers slightly chapped from the water and the wind despite how hot out it is. "We've done a lot of charming country things since we've come out here, but this is almost more than I can handle."

Eridan rakes a hand through his hair, and the moisture there makes the sun-bleached strands stick up every which way, and you don't bother biting back your smile as you start handing him socks. "It's not my fault the dryer broke," he gripes. "And the pair 'a us are about to run out of clean clothes, so it's not like I could keep puttin' it off till we can find someone willing to come all the way out here."

"Maybe we should just leave it broken." His once favorite shirt, a soft, pale lilac thing, flutters next to your face in all it's paint stained glory, and you batt at the cuff of the sleeve when it moves close enough to brush your nose. "Isn't it supposed to make clothes last longer if you dry them in the sun instead of with the machine?"

Unclipping two pins from his shirt and sticking them in his mouth, he takes a pair of your jeans from your outstretched hands, pinning up both sides and then sliding them apart from each other the line so the waistband won't wrinkle as it dries. "It's nice now, sure enough, but I'm not doing this shit when winter comes. Do you have any idea how bad the winters are here?"

"I might have heard mention of the word "feet" when the topic of snowfall comes up."

He looks appropriately chagrined at your enthusiasm. "Must be nice to be comfortable in whatever weather you find yourself in," he grumbles, tugging at his shirt to try and unstick it from his back.

"It sure is," you drawl, floating around lazily to steal one of his clothespins and use it to hold his bangs back out of his pink face. "I could probably put on a sweater and socks and a coat and gloves right now and be just as comfortable as can be."

A shudder shoots down his spine, and his mouth is scrunched up on one side in obvious displeasure. "Just thinkin' about it is giving me heat stroke. So you should stop rubbin' how much of a freak 'a nature you are in my face."

It's easy to pull the t-shirt out of his hands and insinuate yourself in his personal space instead. The scent of laundry detergent is thick in the air, almost eclipsing his deodorant and the slight twang of salt you can make out when you're this close to him. "You love it."

His eyes go soft around the edges, smoothing the wrinkles behind his glasses that he always has from squinting and scowling (something that didn't stop just because you moved away from the city). The shirt falls easily from your grasp, and he tilts you up with a hand on the back of your neck, cool from the water in the wash and enough to make you shiver when it presses against your feverish skin. His mouth is cool, too, like he'd just eaten a bowl of ice cream before hauling the basket of soggy laundry outside, and you think you can taste vanilla on his tongue.

"Lord help me, I do," he chuckles against your lips, and he doesn't even complain when you wrap yourself around him despite the heat you have to be giving off yourself, fingers twining in his sun warmed hair to pull him close again and kiss him until he's breathless and hazy eyed in your arms.

"What are we having for dinner?" you ask, and his gaze sharpens, eyebrows drawn down so hard it has to be hurting his face, so you laugh and kiss the wrinkles there until he sighs and relaxes.

"Well, given' the monumental occasion we got here, I was thinkin' about going all out and having a right proper Sunday dinner."

You have to try really hard not to laugh. "Fried chicken?"

"With garlic mashed potatoes, y'all."

You have a spectacular grease fire and Cheerios instead, but when you tumble him into bed that night, the sheets smell like flowers and sunshine, and it makes your heart hurt in the best way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've only got one chapter to go till the end! I'm going to be answering questions regarding the lore of the story and anything else you guys might be interested in, so follow the link to my post about the Q&A [here](http://princessofmind.tumblr.com/post/45715409810/so-since-the-trouble-with-lesser-demons-will-be) if there's anything you've been wondering about.


	30. Future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we go! The final installment of Lesser Demons. It took a lot longer than the original thirty days, but I’m so proud of it and where it’s gone. Thanks to everyone who’s supported or screamed at me over this story, or just read the damn thing, and if you have any unanswered questions at this point, go check out my upcoming [Q&A session](http://princessofmind.tumblr.com/post/45715409810/so-since-the-trouble-with-lesser-demons-will-be)!

It started with the wards.

Without the focus on combat and running around the city at all hours of the night, Eridan had time to get elbow deep in all that he was capable of defensively. The wards he'd had up at the apartment were simple but sturdy, like a concrete wall. It didn't discriminate. Anything with any kind of negative energy signature couldn't get through. Not only did the wards have to come down to let you in and out, but there were artifacts and books that Rose couldn't transport over the threshold unless he unsealed the front door completely. It was inconvenient, especially considering how often you came and went on your own, but he didn't have the time to try and make anything more practical.

That changed when you moved to the country.

At your rough estimate, you had between two and three weeks before your mistress tracked you to where you'd rather abruptly fled to, and he had exactly that amount of time before you started getting some very unpleasant visitors, more obvious and more powerful than the ones that had ventured into the spiderweb of streets in the city, because these wouldn't have to hide. There was nothing around to hide from.

So he poured over his books while he was recovering, sleeves shoved up to his elbows and his glasses grimy and spotted with ink almost as bad as his fingers. The whole house practically quivered with the energy, and as he worked and created and bent it to his will, you found yourself a little sick to your stomach at the thought that he's probably just as desirable a prize as you are. He's no great hero, hasn't felled such an absurd number of your kind that it would attract a thirst for revenge, but he's smart, and his command of the arcane forces that work against your natural state of being is truly impressive.

He finishes the wards with three days to spare. There are two sets of them; a strong, all-encompassing barrier that goes around the edge of your property. It's impassive just like the old ones were, but souped up, a concrete wall reinforced with rebar and barbed wire on the top. You never leave the property without him, so it doesn't need to be altered to let you come and go. There's a second one around the house, one that tingles against your skin in a distant, thunderstorm-rolling-in kind of way whenever you enter or exit, but it's never once hurt you.

You can both tell when something gets too close to the edge of the property. You feel a sameness, black and beckoning like cold fingers against feverish skin, and he feels foreboding, a fingernail dragged down his spine and electricity in the air. Nothing has broken through, and you haven't had to fight. Your mistress is obstinate, stubborn, but also eternal. She knows what she has to do.

She just has to wait for him to die.

The handful of years he has left are hardly the blink of an eye to a being like her, and when she realizes that her thralls and helpers can't force their way through the wards on the edge of the trees, she backs off. There's almost nothing. Just the curious nudge of energy every few months, like a child prodding at a loose tooth to see if it's ready to fall out or not. And every time, he gets tense, paranoid, like his powers could be so easily felled, so you sit with him on the couch and make him coffee just like he likes it and watch bad daytime television until the darkness slinks away and he can breathe easily again.

He lives five years longer than the doctors said he would.

And they aren't five years of struggle and pain and barely hanging on. They're five years of sunburns in the garden and home made strawberry ice cream with fruit you grew yourself and a tenacious cat that slinks in and out of the trees to be fed at the crack of dawn. He's healthy, and his unhappy wrinkles seem to smooth even as his hair turns almost completely to grey. He smiles a lot more, his teeth a flash of white against his sun-darkened skin, and because of the uncertainty of it all, you cherish him. Spoil him. Treasure all his eccentricities and annoying habits and indulge him as much as you can until he tries to tie your tail in a knot out of frustration (and a little after that too).

The wards tip you off, just like they did when he got hurt all those years ago.

It's more gradual than the almost complete dispersal of power. Like someone has a dial to an electric fence and is starting to slowly crank it down from lethal voltage to the off position. And although you shouldn't be so accepting, you've had more years with him like this than you'd ever anticipated, and the gradual fade of power, something you can feel at the base of your skull, something you can track and monitor, takes the edge off. He's not going to slip away in your sleep. The world has seen fit to give you it's two weeks notice, and you're grateful.

The routine barely changes. He still gets up too early and naps in the middle of the day when the sun slots through the living room windows just right. He still weeds the garden and complains about dirt on his jeans, and he still clips clothespins on your tail when you help him hang the laundry out to dry (the dryer got fixed, of course, but just having it there as an option seems to make him enjoy the old fashioned act of letting it dry in the sun all the more). But there's little things scattered in there. Small changes, like how he doesn't push your head away when he's bent over the herbs and you nuzzle his sweaty hair, or how he's far more indulgent of your whims, lets you spread him out on the quilt you got at the farmers market last autumn in the middle of the fields, hidden in the tall grass, as you kiss him everywhere until he comes apart under the painfully blue sky.

You can tell when the infection sets in, because instead of prodding at the weakening barrier, that dark presence just settles in. Like a big cat watching a limping gazelle, waiting for it to weaken enough that it can dash in and snap it up in it's jaws. More than what happens to you, it scares the shit out of you to think about what she could do to him. He's kept you safe, tucked away, for nearly ten years. A decade. Nothing compared to her life, but for his already woefully short lifespan, that's a huge middle finger right in her direction. She could gut him, get her fingers in his head, take his body and breathe poison in it, turn him in to one of her deathless errand boys with the empty eyes and the bloody smiles.

It's that thought that wakes you up in the middle of the night sweating.

And it's thoughts of what she'd do to you that makes him shift uneasily, eyes flickering behind his softly bruised eyelids, murmuring distraughtly until you draw him close and rub his back under his sleep shirt and settle him back to sleep. He knows just as well as you that she can't get you back. The capacity for duplication is there, and while you still don't understand what it is about you that she finds so alluring, having yourself and dozens of creatures similar all under her control can't possibly lead to anything good. You don't want to contemplate it. Neither does he.

It makes the solution so obvious, and so less painful.

The day had been beautiful. His lungs sound terrible, clogged and moist, and he grimaces a little every time he coughs, and although you can't tell, you're pretty sure it's because he can taste blood. You spent most of the day out on the porch swing, the breeze stirring the chimes as you look out at the garden, finger combing his hair into as many ridiculous styles as you can when he rests his head on your thigh. It's warm, but not unpleasantly so, like a hug from a towel fresh out of the drier. You feed him blueberries until his tongue is purple instead of dark pink, and you nip his fingers with your needle sharp teeth, just barely, when he returns the favor.

You don't go in for dinner. Just leave him stretched out on the weather-worn cushions on the swing and make two cups of coffee, fixed with sugar and hazelnut creamer, same as always. As the sun drifts behind the treetops, painting the swaying grass in shades of gold and purple, you can feel the energy starting to press in from all sides, like a grape held in the palm of a person's hand and squeezed until it pops. For an instant, you're positive it's not going to hold, and although the wards strain, and you can here some of them hissing in furious warning, they stay firmly in place. He's leaned against your chest at this point, sipping from his mug, and although his chuckle is raspy and wet and borderline painful, his grin is so gleeful you know it's genuine.

He's very proud of those wards.

It's such a nice night out, and you almost want to stay out on the porch, but there's too much open space, too much sky above you, so you help him back in to the bedroom, where the curtains have been flung open and the sheets are still mussed from the morning you spent there. He curls in the blankets, wiggling his shoulders and looking for all the world like he's just being a lazy asshole who doesn't want to get out of bed. You sit next to him, smoothing your thumb over his cheekbone, and he raises an eyebrow mildly behind his crooked glasses.

"Second thoughts?"

You snort and flick the tip of his nose. "Course not." It really ought to embarrass you how much you've picked up his speech pattern, but he's the only person you talk to. Only makes sense.

The pressure is rising, like you're flying to the top of a mountain and it's making your ears plug up and your lungs tighten, and although your posture is relaxed, you can feel the heat in your eyes, responding to the threat that your body doesn't think you're prepared to meet. His eyes are soft, but still sharp, not hazed with the pain you know he has to be feeling, as he pulls you close, fingers warm through your clothes as he kisses you and you can taste the tang of iron in his mouth.

He butchers the words like he always does, whispered against your lips. They just weren't made for the human tongue, but just like every time he's mangled the growled consonants and lilted vowels, it breaks your heart and builds it to something stronger in the same instance. You don't cry. Just whisper the words back, how they're supposed to sound, and he shudders, just like every time _you/ve_ said them, curled close to your chest with his fingers against the skin on the back of your neck.

His eyes are calm behind the glasses. Filled to the brim with life, love, and above all happiness. Such an all-encompassing happiness that it humbles you to be part of. Yours have to look similar behind the flickering of power, because he tucks his head against your neck, breathes you in, and you can feel his smile against your skin. You press your own against his hair, not a breath of space between your bodies.

The wards flare, one last attempt to keep out the overwhelming darkness practically screaming to get inside.

_A blaze of glory._

You squeeze him tighter, feel his breath stutter as it brushes your ear, the warmth in your heart overflowing from your eyes as the house burns down around you.


End file.
